The WAN Show - Xbox Was Worse Than We Thought - WAN Show July 10, 2026

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

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Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 Volt and 2026 Equinox EV models. Visit your local Chevrolet dealer today for more details. What's up everyone and welcome to the WAND show. We have a great show lined up for you guys today. The big news this week is, of course, the massive restructuring going on at Xbox. It was rumored and now it's.

has happened and I got to admit I'm probably going to get myself into trouble with this topic because I've got a bit of a controversial take on it in other news oh man Steam might need to do

something about their refund policy and I mean oh man I'm going to get myself into trouble with this one too maybe make it worse because the way that it is right now is harming indie devs in way that I got to admit I didn't see coming. What else we got going on this week?

Well, the most important news of the week above the Microsoft stuff is that Hannah Montana Linux has a modern remaster nearly two decades later. Really? You went with that? So we can use that now. Classic Luke. That's good. That's very good. Classic Luke. Also, I don't know, man. Why not this? GOG joint CEO says that the future of gaming shouldn't come at the expensive ownership. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Oh.

The show is brought to you today by Squarespace. MSI, Tshiba, and Motion Gray, alongside our rap partner, Gbrand, our laptop partner, Razor. And our chair partner, Razor. All right. Before we jump into the Microsoft topic, we should probably explain what's going on here. Times are tough times are tough and bandwidth

But it's been a hard And compute especially Are getting Been a hard year Are getting expensive So Luke had the Brilliant idea Was it you?

I don't know Someone Someone on set Let's blame Dan Had the brilliant idea Of saving some bandwidth On streaming on floatplane For the WAN show

I think it was you and Dan By reducing the amount of movement in the frame. So Dan came up with the innovative idea of shooting... Oh no, I think the plate was me. Creating a plate. Pretty sure the plate was you. I think Dan brought up the idea of just like reducing...

Right, right, right. By not moving, we saved money. Yeah, so we shot a plate of the set, and then Luke and I just have our heads poking up through it. So I don't know if we're going to do this the whole time, but we could see. Can you look at the stats and see how much less bandwidth we use like this? Do you think it's significant?

No, I can't right now. Okay, well, someone's going to have to look at it. Someone might be able to... At some point. and offloading five, yes, five studios. They've announced 3,200 role eliminations, so 1600, when it was announced, 1600 by end of year, on top of 1600 others across Microsoft's workforce.

And the aim here is shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects in the case of Xbox like Halo Minecraft and the Elder Scrolls, In an open letter written by Asha Sharma, Xbox apparently grew their business too fast during COVID, making teams 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation. Many such cases. With up to 14 layers of management for decisions. Now they're cutting back as margins are three to ten times lower than the competition, and Big Green has lost 64 cents for every dollar they invested. Instead of just shutting down five studios Xbox has allowed compulsion games and double-fine

to transition to independent studios with their IP catalog and runway for their next games Which is actually kind of cool Which is actually pretty cool Undead Labs and Ninja Theory will be sold to undisclosed buyers And their games State of Decay 3 and Senua will still be released Sineuma, I'm actually not sure Arcane Lion, Maker of Dishonored, Death Loop, and upcoming Blade game is in the initial phases of, quote unquote, exploring other options.

But this wasn't the end. Later this week, Id Software lost about half of its workforce, approximately 90 people, and has been reduced to the size of the team that released Doom 2016. Meanwhile, Obsidian lost about 25%, so this is 60 to 70 people, and a vowed to has been canceled. although a small team will continue to work on the game in hopes of it getting uncanceled while they wait for a new fallout project. I'm concerned about that. That feels like that group is maybe in the second part of this layoff.

That's how I read that. Hopefully not. Let's hope not. Another thing I wanted to note is that Microsoft had investments in projects going on that were not just in Microsoft Studios. So like I.O. Interactive is one of those. The Hitman developer, who also just realized, least the very good

007 game. I heard their adaptive controller, their accessibility team got absolutely brutalized as part of this, which really sucks because that's something that... Those were industry leading and people use them for things outside of just Xbox.

That's really unfortunate. But yeah, so IO. Interactive is fine to be clear, but I think they were working on an RPG or a fantasy type game, which would be a little bit different for them. And a lot of the funding for that somehow, some reason, not sure, maybe it's supposed to be

on GamePass, I don't know, was through Microsoft and that funding is gone. So I always had to respond with effectively layoffs of their own. Apparently the project isn't canceled, but I think a studio is closed and there were some other miscellaneous layoffs. Yeah, rough. We've got quite a few discussion questions. I am going to jump in with one that I think is going to be maybe a little bit controversial. I love starting the show on a controversial note.

Where is it? I wanted to. Okay. I'm just going to, I had kind of written it down, but I can't find where I wrote it. So let me pose this to you. I think that we can all agree that layoffs are bad. I don't think there's a I don't think there's a winner I don't think consumers win

I don't think they're getting you know more or better products necessarily out of a layoff I don't think the employees win you know not having your job throws your whole life into uncertainty like our man it's amazing as adults how much of like I don't know about maybe not everyone but you know for me

my job is a huge part of my identity and my value basically the first question after people meet you is what do you do yeah yeah and that's that really is it that's it when you're in high school when you're in elementary school it's like what's your favorite color yeah high school it's like what are you studying or that's more maybe more college is what are you studying what are you studying post universities what do you do what do and they don't mean tately winks tournaments on the weekend yeah um and meanwhile i don't think i don't think it's a minute tournaments on the weekend or sick though

think it's a win for for Microsoft either I don't think I don't think I don't think Microsoft wants to be in a position where they're where they're terminating jobs no they wanted to be in a position where they had a hundred million game pass subscriptions and they thought this was the path there this wasn't what they wanted and so so we can all agree layoffs bad for across the board can I ask a question though and if the answer is if the answer is you know that's a stupid question I'm totally I'm open to that end answer. But I want to ask a question here. Is it better to expand like crazy and hire a bunch of people

and try and do all this stuff and have layoffs? Or is it better to just never hire anybody in the first place and just be obscenely profitable? It occurred to me just because it came up for like the fourth time in the last few months that Valve's a really small company. Yeah, but are they though? Are they? Valve chooses to have several hundred employees

while being one of if not the most profitable companies per headcount. And the reason this came up this week was because I was talking about sort of like how they just keep acting like such a tiny little company. Like steam

controllers are back ordered until mid-Nest. year or something like that. Don't quote me on the exact date. And I'm sure they're hoping to hit it at an accelerated schedule and all that. And they may over-deliver. To be clear, I'm not like, I don't want to trash on Valve here. But also, you know, we give a really hard time to companies who over-hire and lay people off. And I feel like Valve gets a free pass for just being like, by-

Not having created the jobs in the first place. Buy the yacht manufacturer wealthy. and just never hiring anybody and then going, oh, oh, woe is me, I simply cannot do a longer press briefing for the most important product of the year because we're a really small,

you have to understand, we're a really small company. And so I'm just wondering why there seems to be a double standard here. To be clear, Microsoft created this situation. They wrote, the story where they're the villain of the story. They also bought out other studios in order to do that.

Because they didn't have to do that. So they gobbled up all the jobs and then deleted them, which is worse. Unless we don't know what situation those companies that were gobbled up were in. Like I remember talking back when I toured Monolith, right? They talked about the difficulty of being an independent studio. How you basically just, you starve while you develop what is hopefully a home run hit and then

you eat and realistically you lay off a bunch of people at launch anyway because you don't need QA when you're sitting

at the like conceptualizing stage of your next title and then you like ramp up ramp up ramp up again and then you're starving and then you

hopefully hit a home run again like it's also very challenging like live service games came around because the feast or famine nature of the games industry is really, really challenging. It is interesting that you mentioned monolith, because aren't they gone?

They are gone. But would they have been gone anyway? I don't know. That's an interesting question, one that we unfortunately have no magic time travel crystal ball to ask. Even if you did, I don't think you could. Because I think they changed hands. I think they went to Warner Brothers or something.

So they started independent. You wouldn't know what happened if they kept going down that line. You wouldn't know what they happened if they stayed with Microsoft. You can probably guess. Yeah, it's rough. Because it's, I mean, it's not Minecraft, Elder Scrolls, or Halo. Yeah, Monolith was owned by Warner Brothers from 2004 until it shut down in 2025. You know what's interesting?

Shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects. And then outside of the quotes, it says, Halo, Minecraft, and Elder Scrolls. Did they say that or did we say that? That is something that they've talked about, but it might not have been as part of that quote. It's interesting to me that they didn't mention anything from Blizzard, Activision. Um, okay, I wouldn't read too much into that yet. Oh, I didn't mean as like a studio closure type thing. It's just interesting that like in their perspectives, those are their, I want to say Halo projects, but Halo's in the thing so it gets complicated.

But you know what I mean. Right. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting, interesting, interesting, interesting. Halo still being something that they glum on to is interesting because Halo is such a strong part of Microsoft's gaming identity, but Halo's also been just dead for so long. For a really long time. Yeah.

What would it take to resurrect Halo for you at this point? Oh, that's tough. So context there is I was a huge Halo fan. Basically Halo raised him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no. But like, if you ask, I guarantee you.

It had involved me. I know the answer. If you ask Luke, what's his like biggest? childhood memory, most like... So you know where I'm going with this. I know the one that you're referencing. Christmas morning, his dad scammed him, just completely bamboozled him. Could never trust that man.

Yeah, into thinking that he had gotten, like, it was like clothes or something. No, he tricked us that the big box in the corner had a crystal ball under it that was for my mom. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. But actually... So we were supposed to keep my mom from getting us to open it because it was for her and he wanted it to be the big reveal at the end for her. No one else knew that he said this to us.

So Rich and I kept, Richard, my brother kept getting our family to not let us open this box and nobody knew why. And then at the end, under the box, was an Xbox. We lift it without looking at it to show my mom.

We're looking at my mom for her reaction and she's looking at us all confused. And then we look under the box and there's an Xbox and Halo. And I think there was another game, but there was Halo. There was Halo. Yeah.

What an absolute legend move. That was huge. We do have... Oh, right. So, yeah, what would it take? What would it take to make you excited about Halo again? Because I guarantee you, it won't be making it an Xbox exclusive, and Microsoft seems to be back to like, oh, yeah, Xbox exclusives are important.

Like, would you buy an Xbox to play Halo? I doubt it. Not current ones. Honestly, I think there's a lot that they could do. Halo Infinite Multiplayer is actually pretty good. I had fun. But it doesn't feel completely there.

That's fair. In my opinion. That's totally fair. I also think that the single player, like, they actually had a pretty interesting idea. I was really excited to play it together, and then Luke played like a little bit of it,

and he was like, yeah, it's lame, don't bother. We can still play it together if you want. If you ever play video games. Campaign Evolved is coming out. Okay, yeah. We could do that instead. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, a recreation of the first one.

We're probably going to talk about that later in the show too, because Assassin's Creed, Black Flag came out yesterday. Have you played it already? Is it good? I have thoughts. It's going to be a longer conversation though. All right. We'll get to that later.

Um, but yeah, I don't know. I think going back to roots a little bit, I don't like what they've done with Cortana. Um, I don't, I think similarly to a few different franchises, they need kind of a reset. Okay, so they're weighed down by just like a convoluted stupid canon that was written by people who honestly didn't understand what made Halo great in the first place. Oddly enough is like I read some of the books because I'm a f***-nard. So I think you could go back. Go into Master Chief's. Is there enough?

Is there like a time travel mechanism in the Halo universe? No, but just do a prequel. Halo 1 prequel. You have to do a prequel. You have to do a prequel right though. like I actually think the game could be very different because it could be like John during the John Halo during the Spartan training program sure or something like that it's got to be you can't reach reaches in the past I don't know I stopped paying attention after three it's tough because like when your prequel you have to like your next game

has to be like bigger and better and more exciting and have new mechanics right but a prequel can't break the rules of the timeline of the of the universe. So like even be, so it was 1999, okay? I was only 13 when the Phantom Menace came out. And when R2D2 fires up his rocket boosters, I'm like, I wanted to walk out of the theater. I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen. If he had rocket thrusters, why didn't he use them later?

And the whole like canon thing where R2D2 has sentience because he's like never been wiped or whatever. So what? He forgot? He forgot he had rocket thrusters? Like it's just so whatever they do in the past, they have to fight the urge. I will also point out people are saying reach was in the past. People really liked reach. I didn't play reach until years afterwards because I think that's when I like first started

going to university or something. I didn't have time. And I was away from my Xbox because I was at school. but people really liked Reach Reach was a very positively received game so I think they could do something like Reach again but I would I would get off of

I would get off the current timeline I would get off the current timeline I would try to get off the current timeline or like find some way and it's this is the problem it's just comic book it why not just reset something like that like honestly I think I think

I think Disney should do that with Star Wars too just reset it started over because it's gotten so convoluted. There's so many things that started out as a pitch for how to sell a toy that just make no sense in the canon anymore. But then, I mean, I don't mean while, they try and do a reboot with Harry Potter and everyone's like, oh, it's stupid.

Man, and they did the, uh, they, that completely derailed, man, I don't know why. What's going on with my brain today? Um, oh, right, they did the TV show. And it was just so stupid. stupid. Like, oh my God. Okay, okay, here's a question. Here's a question. Oh, man, we're going to trigger him so hard. He's already probably got an upset headache. Which one do I hate more? What do you hate more? The Warcraft movie? You knew where I was going with this. Or Haleigh or HAL TV show.

Really? I think so. And the Warcraft movie pissed me off. But the Warcraft movie is so offensive just because Blizzard was so good at cinematic and storytelling. They did it live action for some reason. Oh man. They had cinematic so down that I bet you can still find it. There's like, I bet you on YouTube. There's a like Warcraft 3 all cinematics.

Workerf three all cinematics. Yeah, yeah, I got you. Workerf three all cinematics in chronological order 2.1 million views. Workerf three all cinematics HH high quality remastered. 5.6 million views. Warcraft three cutscenes and cinematics.

pre-wow, 2.3 million views. Oh my God, man. When you can get that many views on just the cinematics from your game, wow. Yeah. And then they changed... We can lose the plate. I think it's... I think the joke's over.

And then they, uh, and they did it live action, which is just so insane. But the Halo one is so much worse. Okay. His helmet's off just like all the time. Like nothing matters. No one that worked on that show as far as I can tell ever played the game ever cared anything about the lore just nothing makes any sense. It's so It's so ridiculous and then and then you have like the the

The waste of Cortana which is which is frustrating on multiple platforms. I'm gonna say not even levels because then they brought it way too early to like the Windows assistant thing whereas if co-pilot now was Cortana I actually bet you it would have been received better. Yeah, well, people were pretty open to the branding of Cortana when they first introduced. And then she ended up being just garbage. So useless. And co-pilot's garbage, but it's less garbage than Cortana was. And I can see a trajectory where co-pilot could kind of do Cortana-e fans.

Yeah. Yeah, eventually, yeah, for sure. The original Cortana was just never going to go anywhere. Yeah. So it's like they have just burned Cortana, which is going to burn any Halo player that like projects themselves to try to be Mr. John. Okay, so basically, um, what I'm hearing is a miracle.

Christmas miracle is what it would take for Luke to re-engage with the Halo universe. Basically set off some ring accidentally and instead of blowing up it or like, uh, biological deleting or whatever those rings do. I don't fully remember actually. Never actually really cared. Um, that doesn't really matter. To be honest.

Whatever the giant ring, Mcuffin is, um, have one of them go off. unexpectedly and it like time warps you or something. And they just be like, whatever, just forget about it. Nothing else ever happened. After we released Reach, just ignore everything. It was all a dream full reset.

I remember, I think I've told this story on Wayne before, but I had to review the original Xbox Elite controller for a video. And I wasn't really sure what to do. And I came up with like, you know what? I'm just going to go to Willow and rent Halo 5 and put it up in the room up there and after work one day I just stayed back and ordered some pizza, played Halo 5.

He did the pizza with your PC. Played the campaign. And I remember finishing the whole thing and just being like, gross. Good controller. But yeah, ick. I don't like that. I mean, hey, if they wanted to start over on Halo, there's a lot of developers out there who

could use a project to work on. Yeah. Speaking of, you know, the really weird engine, as far as I can tell that they're running, maybe they should have used idtech. Oh, dude. Considering Wolfenstein feels great. Indiana Jones looks so freaking amazing. Doom.

Oh my God, what a well-running and good-looking game. It's like my favorite engine out there. Dude, in a world where there's so much. Yes, rage. In a world. In a world where gamers hate poorly optimized games.

Yeah, ITTEC has been awesome. Dude, and look, I'll be the first to admit that I know nothing about, you know, choosing an engine to develop my game. Wouldn't know the first thing about that. Maybe IDTAC absolutely sucks hairy donkey

sack to work with. I don't know that. But what I do know is, man, does the end result ever look and feel good to play? And so as a gamer, I love that. And I'm a little tired of every single game I play being unreal. We didn't have the con, we didn't give them the context yet. So the id tech team seems to be literally completely gone.

No. Like one person or something. I think it was cut in half. In half? Okay, that's not as bad as I thought. Because there was a ton of people saying the whole team was gone. So you did get that from people talking online. You didn't just make that up.

but I think it's not correct. Okay. Okay, the note that we have in the dock is, um, instead of shutting down five studios, but, but this wasn't the end. Later last week,

id software lost about half its workforce for 90 people and has been reduced to the size of the team that released Doom 2016. That's, that's what I've heard. Okay. Well, now people are saying they reduced down to 57 people. which would not be half of its workforce.

I don't know what's going on, but I don't know that the whole team is gone. It sounds like they were massively force reduced. It's not all unreal. It's just all made on Unreal 5. Okay. No, no, that's what he meant. That was my point.

Yeah. He meant Unreal Engine, not Unreal Tournament 2004. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, so I don't know. I'm not sure. No, I mean, like, I don't know exactly what's happening at id.

But it, but it sucks because I really did like that engine. Doom 2016, like, my God, what a well-running game. And some people have pointed out like, Indiana Jones wasn't well optimized. I don't think Indiana Jones was about the optimization. No, but what Indiana Jones was was incredible looking for how it did run. Mm-hmm. Like that's the, that's the thing, right? Guys, it's all, it's all relative to what the vision of the game developer was for that game.

Their vision was something that looked filmic. Oh, wow, it's weird seeing, like, we have a TV over here. I can see myself move now. It's odd. And Indiana Jones looked freaking filmic. Not all the time, right? But there were occasional moments in cutscenes when I was like, holy shit. Did Harrison Ford get young again?

Am I watching Indiana Freaking Jones right now? Which is wild. Which is incredible. They didn't optimize for optimization. They optimized for looking good. Exactly. And that's a game developer choice. You don't have to like that choice.

But not every game needs to be Dota. Not every game needs to run on absolutely every piece of hardware on the planet in order to maximize how many skins they can sell, right? Everyone's got a different strategy and that's fine. That's acceptable. Apparently, someone in chat is saying, Digital Foundry said Indiana Jones and Doom TDA are optimized. Indiana Jones is 100% ray traced and ran on non-ray traced hardware. It's so cool.

Anyways, that sucks because I don't know. I don't know if I'm well placing this, but I've been a little bit tired of Unreal engine running basically everything. Here's a new discussion question that I assume David did this talk. Yeah, of course it was David. He asks, will Xbox exist in 10 years? Which I don't think either of us would have any way of knowing that. But the more interesting part of this question, in my opinion, is who will own it? Microsoft doesn't actually seem that interested these days.

If Microsoft were to sell Xbox, who would be lining up at the door to buy it? Does Amazon still have Luna? Saudi Arabia. I thought they've been pairing back some of their cultural investments. When was that? They bought Neantic. Niantic? Niantic? Whatever.

Yeah, they did buy it. They did buy Neantic. That was relatively recent. Amazon Luna still exists. Wow. Wow. Featuring Top New Games, courtroom chaos. From Xbox to A. H. H.R.S.T.G.

get it? Amazon? And their logo has a little. hole in the middle of it? I get it. Get it? Hey, that is actually kind of the logo for Luna. Anyways. Whoa, that was that's all you get.

Dispatch. Okay. Oh. This is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I will never be free of this game. I've probably spent more time in that game than like practically any. Skyram immersive adventure. Yeah, okay. Amazon is still a thing. So maybe Amazon.

Load that up and scroll up slightly. What was that category? What was that second last category there? What is this category? Immersive World Adventure Games. It's like, oh, wow. Other than Alan Wake, old games. Skyrim.

I can't even click on this. Oh, I can go here. Okay, no, we got Hogwarts Legacy. That's in there. That is newer. But you also have Fallout 3 right beside it. Indiana Jones in the Great Circle. Okay, yeah, well.

Also four, that's slightly newer. Yep. It's not that new anymore. No, I said newer. It's like 10 years old. I said no, I said no, I'm!

Yeah, who else? I also skipped, oh, who will own it? Who would buy Xbox? Amazon is a, is, I think, a pretty good guess. You would need to have, you'd need to have like, holy shit. Would Invidia buy it?

I don't think Invidia is that interested in gaming right now. I, and, okay, so. G, box, G. Invidia hasn't. We had, we had. At the extent. There's no way it wouldn't be the G spot, though. Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

We had Xbox, we had A-hole. Yeah. Okay, now hold on a second, though. In all seriousness, though, there are people at Nvidia who do still care about gaming. That's the funny thing about companies, right? No, absolutely. They're not, they don't actually all march in one direction.

Sometimes they march in very different direction. There's people at Nvidia who still very much care about gaming and wish that they could get more foundry time as much as any gamer does. And, you know, when I brought up the possibility of, you know, yeah, could you guys just spin off G-Force? Basically, I was met with absolutely not. That's our DNA.

That's our history. That's, you know, gaming is a huge part of our culture, and it's, we would sooner cut off our left nut. No matter how small your left nut is relative to your entire body, this isn't exactly how they put it. But they would sooner cut off, a key organ, regardless of the size. Hear me out.

Everyone's going to hate this. You know, if you're playing a video game and there's like this person like that, that person, I'm going to get a, everyone hated that. Invideo buys it, releases a console. Well, they would. Beats the expected price for Steam machine. It's arm-based. And the way that they do it is having it be a very low-end machine that can play a lot of what you're playing,

a lot of the time locally, which is your friend slop, your whatever it's called, machine, whatever, paint, the shoot the gun game. Yeah. Something mealyan, whatever it's called. Mecca chameleon.

You can play that, you can play golf with friends, you can play peak, you can play all those kind of things locally. And then when you want to play Indiana Jones in the Golden Circle, you stream it from G-Force now. So in order to buy Xbox, you don't just have to have the money. you have to have the hardware development expertise you have to have the games industry software relationships which they definitely have the only companies that i could see having having any kind

of a shot at buying the xbox and doing it justice would be like probably amd and invidia or i mean oh man i guess intel technically could they are technically a player And then what, so what Invidia would do then is they would basically, just like they're doing with the RTX Spark, right, is they would accelerate the move towards arm-based CPUs with G-Force graphics for gaming. They would use the leverage that they have with developers to, you know, basically, yeah, optimize for our GPUs. Oh, by the way, also it runs on this thing now. I think that there would be an expectation that they partner with Microsoft potentially on the operating system, at least for one generation or a couple generations. They've already built, to your point, they've already built the cloud streaming infrastructure

that Microsoft considers a key part of the Xbox brand with their own streaming. And as much as I hate it, and as much as people will yell when things like physical games and physical media gets taken away and stuff, people's buying. patterns show that if they can take less pain now, but higher, consistent overtime pain later, they'll almost always go with that option. Debt, loans, credit card payments, services like this. I've seen a lot of comments on the Steam machine saying that people wish that it was $300,000, but could just play games like Mechicameleon and whatever else if they effectively released that box, but you can also get more juice out of it when you need by paying for G4S now or

whatever else. I could see people going for it. I think that's also a more natural route to something like GForce now than pretty much anyone else is offering at the moment. But I mean, from Nvidia's perspective, I could also just see them going, well, yeah, but also we just don't need to do that at all. You know, we could just not. We're already building G-Force now. Yes. We already are going to have, you know, RTX Spark.

We'll just sell the shovel that is G-Force now to some other company or whatever else. Yeah, but I just, I don't think I would, I don't think I could see anyone other than them pulling it off, doing it justice. Could you see Sony buying them just for the studios? No.

And the expertise or anything? No, if anything, I mean, Sony has been pairing down their, their development team. as well right now. I don't think they're in a, I don't think they're in a big acquisition move. I mean, what was that, what was that catastrophic? I agree. I was just poking. Game that they, that they launched for like a few days and they spent like hundreds of millions of dollars developing. Yeah, that's the one. Sorry, Concord. I'm talking about Concord. Yeah.

Sony's been very frustrating because they had such a strong, they were the like strong single player game platform. And honestly, I think that's why they won a bunch of generations in a row. And then they seem, to have just gotten so... They're so enamored with live service. Hard-ons for the whole live-service idea. Live service. And it's like, it's not... Live service games, it seems to be like just...

They were destroying with single players. I almost feel like you'd be better off just trying to brute force win the lottery than try to win in the live service game. And if you win, it's massive. Yeah, if you win, it's massive. But you probably won't. Same deal as the lottery. Well, yeah.

It really does seem like... That's an interesting comparison, actually. You could save yourself... If Sony had spent, apparently, according to my AI overview here, Sony was estimated to have spent $400 million to develop Concord. If Sony had bought $400 million in Lotto Max tickets... I mean, they would have done better. They literally would have done better.

Because they at least wouldn't have lost the money that they spent... They wouldn't have won the small prizes. Yeah, they wouldn't have lost the money that they spent running the servers for it then. At least they would have just put the money in an incinerator. That's the worst case scenario with the lotto. You can't lose more.

Don't you win little things? Yeah, probably. I don't think I've ever played a traditional lot. So it depends how many numbers you get, I think. I have no familiarity beyond how 649 worked when I was a kid. So take that for what it is. But yeah, no, even if they bought like scratchers, they might have at least gotten, you know, $150 million bucks back.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because a lot of, like, the odds a lot of the time are actually, like, mandated. Like, they could have gone to the casino and just put it in the slot machine. Which is unfortunately super normal these days. And gotten more money out of it than developing Concord. Yeah. I mean, obviously hindsight's 2020, though.

Like, you know, I'm not saying that I would have been a Sony exec and I would have been sitting around the boardroom table pitching. Why don't we play slot machines? Like, obviously, yeah, they had to try something. thing, but I feel like you do that if you're trying to just completely trash on somebody's idea. That's the only, because you're basically saying, instead of deleting 400 million, why don't we delete 250 million or whatever? Yeah, and I'm sure they didn't intend to spend 400 million at the beginning.

So, like, there's, there's no, like, super serious way to actually project that idea. Oh, sure. Yeah, hit us, Dan. Yeah, Cody sent this comment. I have to read it to you. If Nvidia bought Xbox, they would rename it to RTX-X-Box. Thank you, Cody. That was actually worth waiting for us. That was pretty good job. Good job. Oh, man.

Where were we? We kind of skipped a question. You asked me, would it be better to just not hire in a Valve way? Yeah, right. Or over hire in a Microsoft way. And I'm just asking, I'm just asking questions. I'm just asking questions. My default route would be to prefer to go the Valve way. But, I have to admit. It's not a terrible point, is it? There is, not only is it not a terrible point, the points that you made earlier, but also is it noble to have tried to create a job and have succeeded for some amount of time

and then eventually fail, or is it more noble to have never created the job in the first place, but not have fired someone. Like, tell me this. Okay, let's say, let's say, let's say, I think there is a, I think the true answer is that there's a middle ground. I think Microsoft went way too hard, and we knew that the whole time. We were calling it out the entire time

as people were, as they were buying up too many studios and doing all this crazy stuff. And I think we've been chirping Valve for forever for being understaffed. I think there's a middle ground. But let's bring it closer to home. Like if Linus Media Group, if Umbrella Corporation were to say,

look, something isn't working, is it better for those people to have been paid for two or three or five or 10 years or however long it is and gain a bunch of experience, that presumably they take with them somewhere else, or is it better for me to have just taken all that money and put it in a dragon pile during that time?

Like, I think that's the question. Yeah. And I don't know the answer. I think in some cases it's tough, and I think for certain people, they're going to see it different ways. Well, yeah. I mean, everything's easy to pontificate about.

There's also, philosophize about, until it's your job. Yeah. Until it's your art, right? Like, that's the thing you've got to remember, especially like games industry, content creation industry. This isn't just for a lot of the people who work here or who work at a game studio. This is not just a job.

Like they're creating something. They put a little bit of their soul and everything they create. Yeah. And that's, it's really cool. And there's some, there's some, there's different types of pain on both ends of the duration spectrum. Like if somebody just got hired and then that happened, there's a, there's a certain type of pain because, they just left what might have been a fairly stable job. Or disrupted their life.

Or moved or something like that, yeah. And then there's the other one where like someone might be, you know, uh, life or level career dedicated to a certain place. And then that gets bumped because when stuff like this happens, the layoffs are rarely clean. Like when Microsoft is announcing, hey, we did 1600 layoffs today and we're going to be doing 1600 more by the

end of the year. There's no way. the rest that creates. There's, for one, yeah, and there's no way that that was clean. There's nowhere that, like, of course, there's going to be people that maybe shouldn't be there for a variety of reasons. And at that volume, there's no way that you perfectly cut all of those. You know, you're going to get some people that is a really bad loss for your company and you just didn't necessarily realize it when it was happening. And that's going to burn them.

And also, it's interesting that they pointed out in here, like, okay, obsidian lost 90 people. and now they're at the team size that they were at when they released Doom 2016. No, so you mean Ed. What did I say? Is it Obsidian and Doom? So I assume. I don't know why I said obsidian. I meant Id.

I think I read that but meant the other one because I was trying to find it in the notes. But yeah, id. So the same size when they released Doom 2016, but are they at the same energy? And I can pretty much guarantee you no. Because Doom 2016 coming out was kind of mass. I don't know necessarily how well the game sold, but that was a refresh of Doom. It was received super, super well.

And the, like, engine was mind-blowing. That was Vulcan. That was, like, the beginning of the change. Like, that was a huge deal. A lot of people were talking about it. There's a lot of energy. There's a lot of positive momentum. There was a lot of potential energy.

And then when you get half your workforce laid off, and they're like, well, you're back of the size you were, when you release that chop top top now real good game keep going and you have all these

extra years of experience so surely you're much better at doing whatever it is that you do yeah your potential energy is going to be real low probably I assume so it's it's these situations

are tough I I don't envy anyone involved no I and to be clear I'm sure there are

absolute complete sociopaths at Microsoft involved in these decisions who don't care about the impact they're having. But I also genuinely believe in my heart of hearts that there are people for whom these decisions are agonizingly difficult. And then on the other side, for the people who are losing their jobs, I'm sure there are people who were not really that engaged, who were looking elsewhere already. And on the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure there were people for whom working at this company was their identity. What do you do? I work for Microsoft.

Yeah. Yeah. I work at Xbox. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. And like, I don't know, we've talked about it on this show. I was told after we talked about Xbox a little while ago that Halo Infinite cost

$800 million to make. Like something was going to break here. It's been, apparently, they've been basically looting Minecraft and a couple other things. but mostly Minecraft for like years to make all these other things. And it just, it hasn't been working out. There's been a lot of duds along the way. There's been great games along the way as well.

I mean, we talked about this yesterday. I was, or yesterday, we talked about this last time on WAN show where like I was coming in, ready to go guns blazing. How could you possibly do anything that harms double fine? And then we were looking at their games and we're like,

wait, I'm sorry, this is your big game. of the year, pottery fighting each other that had like a peak concurrent player count of like less than a couple thousand players or something like that? Like, oh my God, no wonder

this isn't working. Yeah. There's a discussion question again from David. I really like the questions he came up with this time. Other than Forza Horizon 6, when was the last system selling Xbox game in your opinion? Fort's the Horizon 5.

And not everybody's into racing games. I don't give too shit about them. I really like Forest Horizon 6. I would not buy a console for it. It's not a console selling game to me. It's a fantastic.

Oh, I agree. For me, it's still a fantastic add-on. If I'm buying that console, I'm going to get Forest Horizon 6. Sure. But it's not quite a console selling game for me.

A good Halo? That's the thing, man. If they release one good Halo, we're back, baby. I'm not even kidding. I'm not even, like, I can't even stress that enough.

One good Halo game. Everybody will come back. I, like, it would happen. You know what a funny thing is to me, and I'm going to, I'm going to completely derail this,

but like, why does it have to be Halo? Okay? There's, there's so many great, some special about Halo. There's so many great intellectual properties out there.

Like, how is it that Microsoft doesn't just go to Terry Brooks and be like, okay, we're going to do Shinar. Like, it's like, it's like a fantasy novel. The 15, 20 novels or something like that, bestselling for like decades. Like there's IPs out there. You're Microsoft.

You have enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens. Apparently there was a Shinar game back in the day. Okay, I had no idea. And Rakencloth says kids don't know those novels Yeah kids didn't know Halo either It doesn't matter The point is there's amazing There's like there's like an entire

Small Home Library Worth of lore to mine here Fucking license it And make a great new IP Like why is it that we can only Do like weird stuff Like kiln fighter that no one cares about That's double fine

That's true This is true. This is fair enough. But still, or remake another, remake something. I think, I mean,

I think they could. I'm just saying, if, if you, if you want to knock it out of the freaking park, it's got to be Halo. If you want to do well, maybe Shinar or something like that.

But if it's a new IP, I think it's going to be tough. But you can't have, and you're probably right about, like, what the first one needs to be, but they also have to just, in the holster,

they're going to have to have a lineup of new IPs. I think so. You got to blow it out of the park with Halo and then you got to follow it up, which is another problem that they have, to be completely honest. But I'm looking this up. Somebody in chat said the last good Halo game was released by Bungee. So I wanted to go verify it. The last Halo game that Bungee released was Halo Reach.

So that person is just completely correct. So we've talked about this on the show a bunch of times. One of my massive pet peeve things that has happened to a bunch of my favorite IPs, Star Wars and Halo, being two of them, is you get people that come in and they hire a team

based around the idea of hiring people that hate the thing that they're building. This happened with Halo. You can go find it. They hired people to work on Halo who hated Halo. This happened with Star Wars.

You can go and find it. They hired people to work on Star Wars that hated Star Wars. This can't be a thing. You can find people, and the reason why they did it for both is because they wanted to like renew it and bring some new ideas and stuff like that

and make it appeal to a broader audience. Sure. That's the key. Halo appealed to everyone. Enough people. It would have been fine. Star Wars also appealed to an incredible amount of people. I don't think that was needed for either ship management sim pillar of autumn.

Come on, you play it. There's so many genres that would be perfect. I probably would. Yeah, you would. Hell yeah, you would. A like FTL style game, but a tailo would be sick. And you're in charge of the Pillar of Autumn and you're going to defend it from Covenant attacks. I know.

Oh my God. A more highly produced FTL with more story involved and it's you getting the pillar of autumn out of this like horrible scenario. I would play the hell out of that. Smaller teams like there's so many companies that ship out there. Like Star Wars, the new galactic racers or whatever it's called. coming out is done by the burnout team. It's not done by... Like, just do something fun.

Okay, yeah, but like, I don't know. I think 3-4-3 is going to need some type of a staffering refresh. Sorry. Oh, actually, yeah, Galactic Racers coming really soon. That game looks so cool. October. I'm stoked.

Oh, my God. So stoked. Especially with the pedigree. It does look legitimately. It looks so sick. Insanely cool. This is what they could do with the Halo franchise. It's just be like, you know, oh, you're a studio and you make really good ship management sims.

Here's our IP. Go and do something cool with that. Yeah, how about we both win? You know, create win-wins. Oh, that looks so dope. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very excited. And the burno, people being behind this is like a perfect fit.

Oh, yeah. So cool. Oh, that looks awesome. Just give your IP to different studios. Do not pre-purchase it. Don't pre-purchase anything ever. But even like, okay, even that being said, and I completely agree with Dan, to be honest, I think you can do.

sidebar things. There's been a ton of examples lately. Mecha Chameleon is a great version of it where small fun games with your friends can sell like gangbusters. Do that kind of stuff with these IPs and in these universes, but keep them small games and keep them cheap and have them be group games that you can play with friends and I think it would go pretty well. Cheap is hard. It's hard to do because people who succeed at doing something, expect raises. You can't just keep things cheap. What you could do is you could just lay off all the people who now are paid more and hire new fresh people who are cheap and you could keep costs down that way,

but I guarantee you nobody would like you for it. Is that your employment track into the mainline game developer pool, though? I mean, yeah, possibly. But then you, I think you just, you eventually end up with that pool being too big and then you end up with Concord. Because what are they going to work on now? Yeah.

All right, we should probably, yeah. Andries 528 says, wait, is this still just the first topic? Do we want to talk about Assassin's Creed now? It shouldn't be too long. All right. Oh, really? Luke is going to talk about an Assassin's Creed game. It won't be too long.

Buckles in. Do you want some more water? Maybe? Okay. We're going to be here for hours. We could be, but I'll try. Okay. So, first thing that's interesting to me is the reviews.

I see mostly positive here. I don't remember how to break it out. Can I see? Yeah. Can I see that? You can do by language on the left there. Boom. Mostly negative.

undersimplified Chinese. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but don't they like review bomb stuff if it has a bad translation, which makes sense. I think they do that, but apparently, uh, I thought most of,

okay, so I, I do think that's a bit of a thing and I mean, yeah, that's fair. Yeah. It is language broken out reviews. Yeah.

And if the translation sucks, then sure. But what I've read online is that this isn't actually necessarily because the translation sucks. Yeah. What I've read is that it's because of things like the microtransmitter. transactions and stuff like that, which I think is kind of funny.

Wait, sorry, what? So Chinese gamers don't like microtransactions? Am I missing something here? Isn't that the land what brung us Genshin impact? It's the land what brung us many of those mechanics. But it's interesting to me because I don't know if my memory is perfect on this. I looked in the microtransaction store, so I saw everyone was pissed about it. Yeah.

Horse armor, right? It seemed like the things that you could buy to me were effectively the same things that you could buy last time. So just like last time, it just won't. Right. And it's fine. Right. Okay. So basically you're not mad about that.

I mean, I don't like it. In every single Assassin's Creed game for a long time, there's been some type of really annoying mechanic. And you could just have it not be annoying. for the low, low price of whatever they're charging for the thing. Like you can get free treasure maps or you can get free like resources for your ship or whatever else. Got it. But I just, whatever, I'm not going to do that.

And other than that, it's fine. I saw some people pointing out like the graphics aren't that great. To be honest, for the price of the game and the fact that it's a re-release, I think the graphics could be a lot better. I think the movement is clunkier than I remember and I remember the movement being clunky, to be clear. I don't think I'm actually looking at it with rose-tinted goggles. They also redid the combat because the-

Wasn't the combat what everyone liked? The ship combat was whatever liked. I don't know. I haven't actually unlocked the ship yet because I haven't played a ton. I think I've played for like an hour. But the like ground-based fighting combat. To be kind of in between, I would say, the new games, which are more like RPG-like combat,

And the old games, which... The old games were kind of weird. The combat was a little broken. You could just like perma counter, and then you just sort of win. So it could be like a circle of people around you and you're still going to win the fight, which is like a little absurd.

But the new games have the same kind of problem, but it's because it's an RPG and you're just like spamming abilities. Like in the new... Not the newest. In the newest one I've played, which is like three old at this point. Because I decided that I was going to do

every quest in the game before I finished it, and now I'm like over 100 hours in, and I'm not even close. So I'm just never going to play another Assassin's Creed game, as far as I can tell. I play it like twice a year at this point. I'm just still stuck. Anyways, I, you, like, my character has armor on it that makes people take more fire damage, and I have an ability that lights my weapon on fire, and then I'll just light people on, like, this has, this is not Assassin Creed anymore.

Right. At all. The new games are just so far gone. But anyways, this one is a totally, different combat style. You're an assassin. Shouldn't you not be on fire? No, I have a warhammer.

Right. And I ride a horse into combat. Right. Like an assassin does. Totally. It's, it's, yeah. Honestly, going back. And so I, I, the like first island you end up on, which is the tutorial,

you kind of running around. I, for some reason, because I'm weird, I used to try to speed run that first tutorial island. And without thinking, I was just like, three quarters through it and I had done like full sprinted I remembered every single path and stuff and there was a nostalgia like oh yeah I'm kind of like home again I haven't played this game forever I used to play this game all the time and then the same kind of things wore on me which is that game until you get your ship sucks and I don't have my ship yet so it's just kind of like okay just wasting time

until I get the only good part of this game and then I'm sitting there playing the game but my brain is too busy working on like why is Ubisoft so stupid How did they release this game, which the only good part was the ships? And then they never released another, they didn't release like a ship game. They have other Assassin's Creed games that had ships in it, but they didn't understand that it wasn't the fact that it was Assassin's Creed in ships. It was just the fact that it was just ships. And then they finally announced Skull and Bones and everyone's like, oh wow, you're finally doing the most obvious thing in the f-fitting world. Quadruple-A.

Great. And then they spent a billion years working on it, and they changed the idea so many freaking times. and they call it Kudruplea, and then it blows, and then they sell it for like $3, and no one plays it anyways. And it's just like, what is wrong with you guys? And I think that's what a lot of the reviews are on the game is just like, ugh. Okay, you got me, right?

I bought this nostalgia game for $80 Canadian dollars. Did you really? You spent that much? It costs that much? It costs $80. That's a lot. I don't think I spent that much on it. I think there's been currency changes and stuff since then.

But these are the, these are the prices. And then on launch, they did this, which is like, I think someone told it up, it was like $85 worth of DLC. But to be clear, you don't need any of it. Just ignore it, whatever. Right. And then people were also annoyed that like when you launch the game,

you can flip through the menu and see the other Assassin's Creed games in a timeline and like launch them from there because they're really trying to get you onto the new Assassin's Creed games. Like, that doesn't really bother me. It takes four seconds to skip past it, whatever. Like, there's things that are annoying and there's things that I don't necessarily, I think people are overblown on. But ultimately, I just keep coming back to like, I am not surprised by this.

Makes complete sense to me. Wow, they're close, they're like almost a penny stock. They're almost gone. And it's like, yeah, it makes sense. You've pissed away like almost every title you have. Wow. That's kind of wild, actually. And it was incredibly unnecessary.

Yeah, it's amazing how much Expedition 33 felt like what an Ubisoft or Square Soft game from their heydays should have been. Yep. Hey, just for fun, how many people do you think are playing skull and bones right now? 16. Actually, no, quite a bit better than that. Okay. 325.

Oh, wow. That's actually like genuinely a lot better than I would have thought. Yeah. 325. Good job. We saw. How much did they spend making that? Hundreds of millions?

So much money. And like, I just have to come back to again. Okay. When was Colin Bones announced? Oh, man. A thousand years ago. Apparently I've searched this before on this left. Nice.

Officially announced in 2017. for context there's 6,000 people almost playing Expedition 33 right now and skull and bones is multiplayer yikes yeah oh yikes so you would expect a longer tail on a multiplayer game so it was announced in 2017 released in 2024 pivoted on like a million times yeah i i just i keep coming back to like this is kind of similar to the halo thing Yeah.

We're like, man, they own, they own splinter cell. When's the last splinter cell game that's come out? I actually don't know. The last full standalone game, according to AI, is Splinter Cell Blacklist from August 2013. Bro. What's going on, man? There's like no good single-player FPS games. One released, 007.

And everybody's like, wow. Let's all play this. All right, we should move on. I think this is still our first topic. Is Dan even there anymore? I don't think so. And he's gone. I think he abandoned us.

Nice. Okay, what do you want to jump into? Hannah Montana. Really? Let's come up for air. Hannah Montana Linux gets modern remaster after nearly two decades, almost as long as it's been since Ubisoft released a good game. It's called Sweet Niblets,

and its new version, version 26, is built on Debian, re-skin of KDE plasma. Developer and YouTuber Noah Cagle has released this version, a modern remaster of the infamous 2009 meme distro that was abandoned and almost immediately after release. There's a bunch of stats about it, which no one's going to care about. Hot pink Hannah Montana branding, very nice. That hot pink hot pink Hannah Montana branding can be yours if you are using KDE Plasma 6.

where is it the original 2009 legendary Linux meme but yeah it's a skin for KDE so you don't actually have to get

the probably best distro that there is Hannah Montana Linux if you want your system to be pink pretty terminal um

yeah you could grab the background and you could skin your KD and you'd be fine. Okay. Amazing new worlds. Thank you.

You should do an I-switched. Do we not even know who the original developer of Hannah Montana Linux was? I don't think so. I think it was anonymous. That is, that's pretty wild. You can still download it, by the way.

But it would be, we actually did a video a little while ago trying out random weird Linux distros and Hannah Montana Linux was one of them. And I don't think we were even able to get it working without using a VM or something like that. Like I think it required a work around.

Don't quote me on that. I know some of them did. More usable than Temple OS. I'll give it that. Okay, well, thank you for that. Why don't I pick something? Yeah. Did you know, this, this blew my mind.

Did you know that you can play Half-Life 2 at over 100 frames per second? Yes. In your browser. Wow. I'm going to do it right now. Okay, yeah. That's actually sick. Developers

Sliquins Mm-hmm Uh reportedly a high school student And 98006 Have SLQ and I think

Sure Have released a fully Playable Browser port of Half-Life 2 After about three months of work The game runs natively in your browser

Using WebAssembly To run the engine code And WebGL2 To talk directly to your GPU It's saves files live in your browser's storage and the full developer console works for cheats. It reportedly can hit over 100 FPS maxed out even on integrated graphics, which I have considerably better than right here thanks to our laptop partner, Razor.

The site serves the entire game for free with no proof of ownership check and the port is built on leaked source engine code. So there is no sign whatsoever that Valve has authorized any of this. Valve has historically been pretty chill about fan projects, but this one leans a little closer to full-on piracy slash taking of their IP, which, as we remember from D-brand's companion cube adventure, Valve don't take kindly to. Known bugs include characters rendering with empty eye sockets, since the facial animation system had to be disabled entirely to keep the port stable, and I'm going to give it a shot. Got my gaming mouse in my backpack here.

Specifically a gaming mouse for gamers. Yeah, it's for gamers. It's like a, oh, yeah, no, it's, okay. Yeah, it's a Super Strike X too. It's definitely for gamers. All right. How do you like it? I haven't actually used it for gaming much.

This will be the first time I've actually gamed on it. That sounds very linus. I've just been using it as my mouse. That sounds very linus. Yeah, for like work. You're inviting this guy to play video games for months, dude. You never message me. That is so not even true.

When's the last time you messaged me to play games? I talked to you about. about it literally last week. When did you message me to play games? All right, I'll do that then. Yeah, that's what I thought. I'll do that then. Next time, think before you talk shit.

I don't remember where that line is from. That's a line, though. It's not how I talk to him, usually. I can't believe you've done this. I can't believe you've done this. Okay, okay, so here we go. Web Half-Life 2. Okay?

Oh, wow, you can play episode 1 in episode 2. Where's episode 3? Hold on, let me try and scroll here. Ha ha ha ha. I'm just kidding. Okay, downloading map background 01. Full screen, obviously.

I don't know how long this is going to take. It takes a wee bit. It will. I did it on mine already. Oh, okay, cool. Sick. Oh, I didn't full screen mine. Here we go.

Oh, yeah, no, that's fine. You're good. Yeah, new game. Okay. Can I go to a different chapter? Evidently, no. I don't remember how this interface works. sure, start new game, let's go.

Or wait, oh, shoot, I should have checked the options. Get more resolution. Time to be stuck for a while, I think. Okay, cool. Oh, never mind. Okay, while we get through maybe like some cutsceney stuff, should we do a quick top? Oh, oh, at CW announcement and then explain and do two comms.

My screen is covered. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Cool. End of season. End of season apparel sale. Oh yeah, we've got lots of good stuff in here. Apparently the discount has increased from 30% to 40%. Yeah, so if you're a size that we are having trouble moving for a particular product

or if there's something that appeals to you at 40% off but didn't appeal to you at full price, now is a great time to pick up end of season apparel over on LTT store.com. And it's an especially great time to pick something up right now because we have comms live. You wear your messages. Just add an item to your cart. Check out. You know, I've showed them the flow. Oh, that hat.

I love that hat. I wear that hat every day lately. It's a sick hat, the lan hat. Is it in talking both sides? Oh, there's not that many left to the mediums. There you go. Anyway, the point is, add an item to your cart, and you will see our checkout messages interface. That will go, as soon as you place your order, that will go to producer Dan.

There he is. Hey, he'll reply to it or he'll just pop it up on the screen like that one from Stephanie R up there. Or he will curate it for me and Luke to respond to. It's all up to him. He has the power. Was I going to say something else? Yeah, so now's a really good time to pick up something from our end of season and peril sale. Yay.

We're doing things more like an actual fashion company now. So that's a whole thing. Bridget talked to me through it. She's basically like, yeah, you can't do things like you guys do them. And I was like, why not? And she's like, because that's not how people do them. And I'm like, oh, okay. That's a pretty good conversation.

Well, pretty much. It's not quite how it went. What else is interesting is that the sale runs until July 23rd at 10 a.m. PST. All right. Also, our true spec USB cables are fully stocked with all speeds, lengths, and connector combinations available, whether you need a tiny desk cable or a long charging cable. it's now time to grab yours at LMG.g.g slash true spec.

Do you see this guy? Every once in a while, he has Jay Leno's chin. That's an older reference. Still checks out. Okay. So Dan, you want to hit us with a couple of comms? Sure. Hello, fellow checkout commies.

Luke, I'm excited. Okay, that's probably the best one we've seen since the switch to check out messages. I do like that. I'm excited to see. you at OpenSauce. Yeah. I'm running a CTF at a booth there.

Any interesting stories from community conferences like OpenSauce or DefCon? Interesting stories. I remember you were talking about like some cool, just like hijacking, like wireless hijacking stuff that was just for lulls, like not super malicious or anything. At DefCon probably. Yeah. interesting stuff at DefCon every year. There was a pretty cool, like, baby's first intro to hacking in the, like, Astro security area where they had some, like, space security teams, which was really interesting to hang out and talk to. And then they had this thing where it, like, it taught you how, you know, I mean, lots of satellites are just, like, open. It's just, most people aren't going to know how to. communicate with them at all. That's like basically your security layer. Uh, and how hacking some especially very old satellites is more about like, can you find any information on it at all?

Right. And if you can and you can get a signal up there, you might just be able to take it over, which is pretty interesting. I remember there was this thing from a bajillion years ago where people took over like an abandoned McDonald's set up a massive satellite dish. Uh, so they could, they could take a bunch of a bunch of satellites. This is a long time ago. But, yeah, I mean, DefCon, I have very weird experiences with because I show up to DefCon, walk the floor for like half an hour, and then disappear into a hotel room until the last half an hour of the show because I just work on Goldbug.

Cool. Yeah, they're like challenges. Yeah. So, like, I don't know. The interesting things that happen for me are like solving those puzzles. If you look up Goldbug Crypto Village, you'll find the page for that and the interesting things there. But that's just like puzzle figure outing. At OpenSauce, it's mostly like just meeting people that just have the most interesting interests.

I really like walking around the community booth area. Unsurprisingly, to me, the hobbyist rocketry area was super interesting, seeing what some of the kids in school are like machining. The 3D printing revolution, what is done for hobbyist rocketry is like amazing. That's obviously, there's some really cool stuff you can follow on YouTube there as well, but seeing not just the people on YouTube, seeing people that are just, you know, doing it as part of a university club or high school. club or whatever, it's been really fun. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I have like a, you know, super exciting story. No one asked me, but the last time I was at an event, it wasn't that event, but Michael

Reeves, like, almost died. So that was interesting. I sent down a picture. Almost died. I mean, maybe not, but he could have. I feel like that's a lot of his life. Yeah, he didn't seem phased by it at all. Dan, do you want to put up that picture?

So he was going around this corner very fast. These carts, these are electric carts that do not fuck around. And his wheel fell off, just fell off. Like it could have happened at any moment on a track that was very put together with little tiny flags like this and not a lot. There's, yeah. This feels very open. sauce. Michael Reeves doing something dangerous on a thing that is attached to an engine and wheels on a track that was thrown together somewhat shoddly feels very open sauce-coded.

Yeah. So yeah, pretty much. Oh, Michael. No. So that was fun. He's awesome. Open sauce is wild, man. I don't even know how to. to like explain it. I'm happy that they somehow still get permits to run that show. Dan, do you want to hit us with another?

Sure they get permits. For Luke again, who seems like he might be into it? Have you ever tried wing foiling or any other wind or foil sports? Evolving very quickly over the last few years, buying to use during board setup and tear down? What did they buy? They bought wing foiling. Screwdriver bit hex and bit set torques and the bitcase.

How to wing foil. I think it's like a surfboard with a wing on it. With like a kite. Are we going to show your screen? Sure. I think this is it. That seems like the one. It looks like he's holding like a big inflatable dingy or something.

It's got a water foil. Yes. Yeah. So you're using the one with the foil. The like kite power, wind power that you're collecting from the foil, I guess, the sail, inflatable sail, foil, wing thing. Now the foil is the board that comes out of the water because it's got a wing under the water wing.

Right, that makes sense. Okay, yeah. No, I mean, that seems super cool. I have always been not good at sports that don't have fully independent foot movement. Or hitting. I got to have hurt. Do tend to do a little bit better in those.

Type 5 fun. Other people. No, that's one. Other people. That's type one. You inflict pain onto other people. Yeah, I know. So, I mean, it sounds cool.

But yeah, I'm normally like skateboarding, not so much. Rollerblading, yes. That was usually where my brain went. Independent foot movement I did better with. If both my feet had to be stuck on something. You're okay at snowboarding, aren't you? I'm okay. I would probably be a lot better at skiing.

I've always had that thought. I've never wanted to switch. For the first time in over 20 years, like 25 years recently. That's not true. Oh, skied. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't skied since I was a minor, I think.

I've never skied. You look like a skier, Luke. You don't have the kind of snowboard vibe. What is that? What is that? It means you're not cool. I think that's what you said. Oh, no, no, no.

So I'm a skier, so I think the opposite? Snowboarding is not cool. more though. Skiing's cool now. So they're like back in the in the 90s like like all the kids wanted to snowboard. Snowboarding was the coolest thing ever. And skiing was like for for grandpa basically. That's why I'm a ski.

And not anymore. Not anymore. Now skiing's cool. You know it kind of makes sense to me because I feel like, ooh, am I going to be just way off on this? Like if you look at how people used to play video games. Yeah. RPG games. I'm not going to wear that armor.

I know it's better, but it looks bad. snowboarding. If you look at nowadays, I will look like a complete weird clown or I will pay money to skin my stuff so it looks better but I will always wear the most performant things and I'm going to check my stats and I'm going to try to be better than everyone.

It's competitive and I'm going to practice and blah blah blah blah min-max all the things. Skiing. Hmm, interesting. That's my theory. Good theory. I agree. I also...

Because skiing is like... And snowboarding is more like... I mean, you can tuck on either. Yeah. Yeah. But usually the borders are carving and having fun for style points and doing tricks and stuff like that. I don't know man for the

longest time if anything snowboarders had the reputation for just tucking down the hill and like running people over and stuff versus like you know skiers because it was the it was a demographic issue like it was a bunch of young irresponsible dudes on snowboards but cool kids yeah exactly that's interesting I've had more experience with annoying skiers flying down mountains but I think both sides are pretty brutal. This is fair. So unfortunately, I seem to have crashed it.

I went up this ladder, which may have been like a loading point. I don't know what clear cash does, but... Okay. I can take a guess. Yeah, well, I don't know what cache it's clearing, Luke. I think that was a loading point. Yeah, so if I, can I load...

Okay, can I load this? because it's been working? I've heard you going around. Hold on. Full screen. I've been going around. Okay, so here, I guess this is about as good as it's going to get. Ooh, look at those rays.

Yeah, rain. Oh, wow. Wow. What RTS car are you running this on? It's amazing. How much of my life, looking back on my life, how much did I spend without these rays? Are you gonna, are you a can putter awayer or are getting beaten half-life player?

Oh, I can't hear what he's saying. Bet. Hold on, let me try again. Bit. Hold on, hold on. He's getting beaten guy. No, I'm gonna try again. Bit.

This feels very light as coded. This is our savior. This is how I played Star Citizen. Yeah, it works, I think. I think that's valuable for the Star Citizen. Blah, blah, blah, blah, here we go. Professional physicist.

Okay, so yeah, where's my ladder at? Turn around. No, I won't. I don't want to. I want to go through here. Beem, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I'm going to open this. Precinct 13.

This is why you break Linux, and this is why you're a good QA tester. Go to Nova prospect like a good boy. No, I don't want to. I'm gonna go in there. I like all the blood in the room. It's pretty. It's red. Free teeth.

Free teeth. They're like the ducks at the park. You can take as many as you want. Hey! Oh, so no, that wasn't a loading spot then. Interesting. Oh, that was a bit of a glitchy moment. I think that's a dead guy.

Yeah, basically, it was not good. I'm surprised you don't know who that is. I might have really bad with names. Yeah, pretty rough. All right, why don't we jump into our next topic? This is that, I am pretty impressed at how well that's running.

That's kind of crazy. And this was a couple of, this was a couple of high school students? Yeah. That's, that's incredible. Really good job. Yeah. Wild.

All right. Hey, on the subject of, Valve. Solo German game developer, Zorro Arts, said that his co-op boat game, paddle, paddle, paddle, has been refunded over 55,000 times out of roughly 270,000 copies sold in its first year, a roughly 21% refund rate, which, okay, on the surface is not a huge problem, right? except that the game sits at 90% positive reviews. So how is it that you can have 80% of people not refunding it,

if 90% of people review it positively? Discuss. So actually you don't need to discuss because the answer is pretty clear. Steam's policy grants automatic refunds under 14 days of ownership, ship, okay? And under two hours of playtime. And while the game was designed around three and a half to four hours of play, speed runners and skilled players are rolling credits inside the two hour window.

So you'll actually see reviews, like dozens of reviews, openly saying things like great game, finished within an hour and 40 minutes refunded. at an average $4 sale price we're talking about $158,000 in refunded revenue Now ZoroArts is careful

to say that he supports Steam's refund policy as a player right and he's not asking for the refund policy to be removed but his suggested fix is having Steam display an expected completion time next to the price on every store page so short games aren't punished for being short. I don't know if that solution would really work

either necessarily Maybe you could do an average Are you showing the gameplay? Yeah It would be interesting to maybe have like an average amount of time Players played this game for And an average completed time That wouldn't tell you that much about it

Because like I was blown away by how many achievements I got in Expedition 33 For like just being a third of the way through the story. Like the percentage of people who bought this game and just, I don't know, never played it. So I don't know how...

The percentages for those things on 007 are very high. It's a very good game. Lots of people are playing it. Oh, really? And lots of people are playing it through. I'm not done the game yet, but I don't know. I feel like I'm pretty far into it.

I've played it a decent amount. And I'm wondering how people are, playing right now. Steam stats. Oh yeah. 3,313 people playing right now, single player shooter game that was released like two months ago. It was not bad.

CatOS says it doesn't help that there's YouTubers doing challenges of speed running a game and then getting a refund. I have heard of that before. That's pretty brutal. Well, their thing is they have to keep buying it every time. time they fail or something, right?

I also don't think that they refund it. They just try. So they buy it. They have to buy it every time they try it. I don't know, but it's still content that's out there. Yeah. So yeah, this one, I don't know. I do think, I mean, do they tell people that it's like, it's going to, you're going to play it for an hour?

Because, like, I know they're saying, like, it would be nice if steam put something there, but I think they also don't. Gas Racing says if you get the game. complete achievement. You shouldn't be able to refund, but like... I'm going to put one of those on the menu. Yeah. Yeah. What if you make your game 10 minutes long? Like I could maybe

understand... But then it probably wouldn't have positive reviews. So that's that's where this is a... This is a really unique case. I mean, to... Maybe, yeah, maybe the solution is that they just put a... They put an additional...

They put an additional condition in. So two hours, two weeks. two quarters of the game you know or something like that how do you define a quarter how do you define yeah I was going for half the game

no I know how do you define half the game I don't know that's really tough because what if I spend a bgillion years in act one of BG3 well then you'll go over two hours

right so it's one of yeah yeah yeah because this game I don't know I could I could understand buying this game and then playing it for an hour and being done and feeling bamboozled because what freaking game is an hour long? I know people are saying two hours, but two hours is the limit. There's a lot of people in their reviews saying that they played for an hour.

That being said, it's on sale right now for less than four Canadian rubles. The very cheap game. If I had a good time with this and I played it for an hour and it was $4, I'm not going to be way too upset. There's definitely things that I could do for an hour that cost more than $4. Yeah. Yeah. So like I don't know. I do think some type of visibility on it could be cool.

But I also really don't look back fondly on the days of everybody screaming at game developers. Obsessing about how long is the game. Like I don't even, yes, a lot of people were screaming for longer games, but for me, it's more just like defining the value of a game by how long it is, is like defining the value of code by how many lines it is. Like, it's not... I always hated that. Portal is such a prime example of a game that just completely bucked that trend and its shortness was its greatness. If it had been twice as long, it wouldn't have been as good. In fact, controversial take, sorry.

I did not enjoy Portal 2 as much as I enjoyed Portal 1. It wasn't as fresh. It was longer. Is that controversial? Not a controversial take? I think. It felt more drawn out. I just didn't.

I like Portal 2, but I like Portal 1 more. I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Portal 1. And yeah, oh, West 27 in Float Plain Chat says Titanfall 2 another prime example. They can beat it in a night. Yes. And it's absolutely worth it. I wish I didn't have to. I wish it was longer.

But they do a really good job of they take the good thing away before it becomes bad. It's like a tight script. They don't let you get tired of anything. It's amazing. Spoiler alert, that like time shifting mechanic. I just literally all of it. I just wanted to play with that for the rest of the game. The house building thing.

It could have literally only been that. Yeah. It could have literally only been that. Yeah. That would have been an entire game. Yep. Easily. You know what?

Even though it got a little. tedious for me just because it was like kind of easy it takes two did a pretty good job of that okay introduce it did you ever play it no oh it's it's a great play with the wifie on the couch game um because it's accessible enough that like she can do it even if she's not a hardcore gamer she just wants to play polkoopia now fair enough um that that was a highly successful purchase but a nice thing about it is that it gives you a new mechanic it gives you a short tutorial for how to use it. It sets you loose in a world where you have to use it to solve a bunch of problems and then it

rips it away. Yeah, good. Never to be seen again. Yeah. Someone said also Assassin's Creed and that... Oh, that's making it thing. Yeah. What?

What? I tried really hard to like Assassin's Creed. It's not your kind of game. I own... What's that supposed to mean? Hmm? Is it too cerebral? Linus likes good games.

You like Anna. How could I say that? It doesn't work. I tried really... Maybe it's not cerebral enough. I tried really hard to get into Assassin's Creed multiple times. I would have to check my Steam play history in order to know which one I ultimately tried to play at some point. But I just couldn't.

I just got bored. I did not... I do not care for Assassin's Creed. I do not care for it. I'm sorry. What you got there? Yeah, he said the older Assassin's Creed games are shorter. 15 hours if you speed run the campaign and 41 to 45 if you do a side quest.

Who plays an adventure game speed running? That's what I'm saying. I don't think Assassin's Creed was ever like a short game. Oh, wow. I do not own Assassin's Creed on Steam. I own it on a disc. I do own it. I know that and I see it not in my account.

So that's where we're out on that. Alrighty then. Yeah, I got bored with AC Blackflag actually. I never actually beat Assassin's Creed Black Flag. Random fun fact. I talk about the game all the time, never beat it. Oh, that's the one that you're trying to 100%

all the stuff, right? Oh, that's Assassin's Creed 4. Got it. That's the one that just got remastered. Nice. I never, I talk about it all the time. I played it on stream a bunch. I played it in general a bunch.

I got it pre-release because they gave it to us for like benchmarking review. and I was on the top of every leaderboard for every category Nice Just loved that game Never beat it

Never had any interest at all in beating it Because to beat it You have to go on land I just didn't care Nice Didn't care at all That's true Okay hold on

We have one more question So Oh yeah no Forget it Okay I do have a note About Steam's refil fund policy slash just game purchasing policy. If anyone from Valve is watching,

I know you're not, but whatever, it's worth a shot. I want to talk about my experience trying to buy the Jackbox 10 pack recently. It was really annoying. I forget if it was on sale for Steam Summer Sale or if it was just a deal because it was a bundle. But basically, I saw a price I liked

and I was like, you know what? I like Jackbox games. I play them like when I'm out and about at other people's houses. We do like pool parties. and other kinds of get-togethers, and it'd be nice to be able to just, like, fire up jackbox on this TV, and people can play jackbox games.

It's like a great little, you know, icebreaker. And I was like, I'll just get them all, because whatever, I can. And then I couldn't, because I already owned Party Pack 4 or something. And so if you already own one, you cannot buy a bundle that contains that item.

That doesn't feel normal. No, it doesn't. I would think I thought you used to get No, I don't expect a discount But I thought what you used to get Was a giftable code For the one you already had

No, usually you get a discount Based on the bundles The value of that discount Or yeah, multi-copy So then I was like Okay, fine Well, it's still a way better deal If I literally delete this game

From my account And then buy the 10 pack So I deleted it from my account which you removed it from my library and I tried to buy the 10-pack and it wouldn't let me. Now, to Valve's credit, they have a great little mechanism

where you can restore an item that you have removed from your library, but because of that, it wouldn't let me buy the stupid thing because I already had it, even though it was not in my library, it wasn't actually removed from my account. So I think you have to actually contact them.

People in the chat are saying that it could be down to the developer to set that up. Maybe, yeah, because I've read into this a number of times, and it's always a discount based on the value of what you already own. So that is very interesting. Like I even know when Slaithspire 2 came out, they did a thing where they made it so that you could have a discount if you owned Slaiths Pire 1. And the way that they did that was they made a bundle that was Slaiths Pire 1 and Slaithyter 2. So if you just go to buy the bundle, it would give it to you at a discounted price.

because you would get the bundle discount, which was like 10% off or whatever, but it would only be on the one game. So yeah, maybe it's developer control. There's a lot of developer controls on Steam. That makes sense. Well,

I don't know. I was very annoyed. People were asking if I contacted Steam support. I was in a hurry. We had, there was a party there. Yeah. So I was very annoyed.

I feel like jackpot games, I don't know why I had this thought, but I feel like, out of probably almost most games on Steam, they're probably bought in a hurry more than almost any other one. That makes sense.

Because people are like, oh God, I have a bunch of people at my house. I don't know what to do. The jackpot games, whatever. We'll play this thing. That actually makes a ton of sense.

All right, we can move on from that. What are we supposed to be doing, Dan? More topics. I think we've done a lot of topics, haven't we? Sponsor one to. Oh, we should do that.

All right, the show is brought to you by Squarespace. First impressions matter, especially when you're trying to build a client or customer base. When someone comes across your website, you need to make it easy to use and understand, or else those potential shoppers are just going to leave. You're a respectable business, not a municipality. What does that mean? Oh, this. Oh, Lordy. This is a real website?

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oh and we're supposed to do our float plane announcements also I just want to say someone in chat has some jackback games when to go do the same thing you did same thing happened okay so I'm not imagining it

that's always nice to know and it's and it's my guess at that point is it's got to be developer related because I've had it happened the other way multiple times so yeah makes sense it's always nice to know that I'm not totally crazy all the time

I thought you'd like that all right not only do we have another early release for our floaters but we have another video that is exclusive to float plane that was three years in the making my motorcycle is a finally done after three years in the shop Luke won he completed Final Fantasy 6 before I got there but I got there eventually that's me aboard the Turbo Pink motorcycle Um, freaking love it. Also, I'm supposed to, I think I'm supposed to go and, uh, release a video now.

I forget how to do this. Wait, where's the, am I, where's the CMS? Oh, okay. Sure. The interface look kind of, oh, oh, are we releasing this video? Where is it? Uh, hold on. Uh, wait, what?

Is he going to tell me which video I'm releasing? It just says not only do we have an early release. He doesn't tell me which video to release. Oh, here it is. Oh, yeah, okay, check this out. The 115-inch true RGB TV, Samsung, excuse me, Samsung, Sony's new flagship is here, and I am a man who own a display, get to unbox it,

and he gets to experience it for the first time. It's absolutely flipping, mind-blowing. It's, like, so cool. Hold on, where was... There's also, there's a flipping exclusive there's the next episode of the thing. The thing? Oh, Wizards, it is not released yet?

Not released yet. Never mind. Sammy gave me a timestamp that I'm supposed to go look at. One second here. 1927. Hold on. Where are we at? 1927.

Good year. That's too close. I was not actually really going that fast. I'm very pleased. It just looks really fast. Seriously, I was going like 40. No, it's the... It just sounds really good.

The closeness effect. Oh, yeah, and it sounds great. Yeah. I'm not really that into, that into like, oh yeah, but the bike does sound really good. No, not miles per hour, kilometers per hour.

Kilometers per hour. I was not going that fast. Sammy did a great... He made me do it twice because he missed the shot on the first go-around. Yeah, you nailed it. Good job, Sammy. All right.

Oh, right, I should probably talk about that. So yeah, get all of this and more at lmg.g.gg slash FPWEN. Join all the cool peeps over on float plane. Also, if you, we already talked about, like, check-out messages and stuff. But, hey, if you're looking for something else to pick up over on the store, We have all of our cables in stock right now. Yeah. They are the number one seller every day.

People are freaking loving our true spec cables. We still only have type C to C and type A to C, but sure it's a cable, says Mario M. But what a cable. What a cable. It lives up to its name. Fast charges with a cable that doesn't kink and a shielded with a strong rubber that looks like is built to last. Bravo. Bravo cable.

Bravo I have found it's pretty nice This is hilarious They are five inches long They are five inches long The photos don't show that Variant 40 gigabit per second

0.32 feet What were you expecting, sir? What? What? We don't have a different picture For every length of the cable Also five inches is a lot It's way more than average

Is it? No, average is like seven. I dad, you're gonna crush some souls, Dan. Relax. Relax. Wow. Wow. Neither of you are being like, oh, thank God.

Damn, viewership drops like a rock. Wait to go, Dan! Everybody ran away from... Grab a measuring tape. Oh, Lordy. Anyway, yeah. The cables are doing good. Buy more cables.

They're good. Good job creative warehouse team. Okay, what else we got going on today? Yeah, the shows in centimeters and feet, because I think I saw a Canadian flag, so I was like maybe... Yeah, it shows 10 centimeters. I don't know, man. I don't expect people to read the product page for everything.

they buy. I mean... It's not a product page. It's the name of the product. Okay. I'm not trying to chirp our own audience, but like you literally select on a drop-down. It's literally...

It's literally... This is like the product page. Like, it's... Anyways. We appreciate your business. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Why don't we, uh, jump right into Discord banned thousands of users for posting pictures of chessboards

and Minecraft screenshots. Since May, Discord's automated safety system has wrongly banned thousands of users for posting harmless images including Minecraft inventories,

spreadsheets, game textures, even just plain transparent backgrounds. Some users got hit with permanent bands citing child safety violations for posting Minecraft screenshots. The issue finally blew up after roughly 200 people were banned in a single weekend. Discord CTO, after they investigated, confirmed that it was apparently two stacked bugs.

A single faulty hash in their content matching database would wrongly flag grid patterns as known harmful material, and the system then skipped the human review that is supposed to happen before any action takes place, going straight to permanent bans. A second bug kept the bans locked in even after staff cleared the accounts. Discord said that everyone affected has been unbanned and the bad hash has been fixed. Our discussion question says

a false child sexual abuse material flag is just about the worst thing that you can attach to someone's account by mistake. Should permanent bans even be possible without a human actually looking first? Oh, man. At Discord scale, bro, when almost every user is unpaid, bro? And who wants to review those, man?

Yeah. Like, I can understand. That, too. Oh, God. I didn't even think about that part. Like, there's a reason that we're just using hashes. I don't like that. So that it's no one's job to review this stuff all day.

Like, that's, and there's a, man, there's no, there's no excuse either for banning people's accounts and labeling them child predators when they didn't do anything. I'm going to address that a little bit. Sure. Because this thing said the worst thing you can attach to their account. I don't think it tells every other user. I don't know. I feel like the principal's office has got to have a permanent record somewhere.

Yeah. No, I know, I know. But just like, I don't know. Like I'd feel, I'd feel. They're not putting you on a registry or anything. I'd feel deeply, well, I'm, I'm. I don't know which governments they're cooperating with, actually. I'm in a publicly accessible registry.

I know. Any register. I don't want to be on any registry for that. I would love to go to court and then pull up the offensive imagery. And it's just a bunch of like chess screenshots that I'm sending Emma. Okay. I'm going to tell you, though, the problem with that is that it's far easier for people to make things up about you and damage your reputation than it is for your eventual day in court to absolve you. Yeah.

You will never reach all. those people again. Yeah, totally. So it would still be, obviously really bad. Still bad. There's a, chess.com has a thing right now where if you beat the current bots, you get custom chess pieces, and there was a forest one. And it makes your night's bears. And I was very happy about it. I sent screenshots to like a lot of people. But I didn't get banned. Okay, well, that's lucky. It's a good thing those bears weren't bear. Well, they weren't cubs. Yeah, but they just don't live that long. Oh. So even an adult bear could be well under 18. It's feeling gross now. Bears live...

10 to 25 years according to AI, so... Oh, wow. I don't know. Most of the ones I know are like 50. I couldn't pass it! Oh, he's going to ding it. There we go. Thank you. Nice.

Nice. Thanks for bearing with me. I had to go do that. Oh, very good. Um, G.O.G. Joint CEO has a point to bear. He said the future of gaming shouldn't come at the expense of ownership. An interview with Eurogamer, uh, responding to Sony's decision to end disc production. G.O.G. Joint CEO, ff. Chrisstoff Peplinski. Sure. Uh, said as the industry becomes increasingly digital, players should have, uh, have the full confidence that the games they buy will remain accessible regardless of changes. to platform storefronts or business models. Sick. He repeated that GOG games are DRM free

and come with offline installers, giving people lasting control over their purchases. Even if a game vanishes from the GOG storefront, it never leaves your library, which is a stark contrast to Sony's plans to remove hundreds of films from customers' digital libraries without compensation, the result of failing to renew licensing with Studio Canal,

which is just up to them to decide, if it doesn't feel like it's properly profitable anymore or not. And is not part of a choice that you're able to make, which blows. They're doing something, so I'm just going to keep going. Valve released Windows drivers for Steam hardware, but won't support it, apparently. They released a Steam Hardware Windows Resources page providing drivers for Steam hardware. The resources are offered as is, and Valve says it will not support Windows. on Steam hardware.

They direct users to Steam OS recovery instructions instead, just in case you did have a problem with your Windows stuff. Dual boot on Steam OS is not yet available on Steam OS. Oh, wait. Hey, hold on. You moved on from the GOG topic already? Yeah. Well, no, I wanted to go shopping.

Okay. It was, well, how did this not end up in the thing? What do you mean? Yeah. Where is it? Oh, like you had notes that, okay. Yeah. Hold on.

You want to go shopping on GOG? Yeah, I want to go shopping on GOG. I want to see... It doesn't need to be in there. Just go to GOG. Well, yeah, but I forgot. Because if it was in the topic, then you would have known

that we were supposed to go shopping and you wouldn't have moved on. That's true. Okay, pay attention. I was talking to Dan. Relax. I pay attention, sort of. Oh, my God.

Did we crash GOG? Did we just love hug them? Because it's not loading. Is it loading for you? Working for me, yeah. That's weird. What's my computer doing? Oh, there we go.

All right, nice. So, basically, the segment, is simple. Luke and I are each going to just go on GOG and find a game that we really like that you can get on GOG. Got it. With no DRM

and you just actually own it forever. Like, GOG is so cool. When you download the game, you just get like a file. It's like, this is the game. Okay, well, Luke found his, and he's going to talk about it. Well, I should...

Stop. It is? Okay, hold on. Which one is that? Okay, that is actually a really... Is that $3.60? Canadian, bro. This is actually a great deal. That's a great deal. This is a fantastic game. It still holds up. It's still really fun. I would genuinely actually really recommend you go pick this up. It's really cool that they show. It's the lowest price in the last 30 days before discount.

I might have picked that if I'd seen it. That's sweet. I kind of picked it as a meme. And the more I thought about it, it's like, that's an incredible deal. Game of your edition, Tomb Raider, $3.59. Almost as good as this version of Tomb Raider. $3.59, which is going to be, yeah, Noki says $3.USD. Like, just go, go buy this. Go buy it.

If you haven't played this before, just go get it. It's really good. That is wicked. It's one of the only games that I played all the way through during the years of, like, starting LNG and having young children. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also played it the whole way And it's very good

It's a genuinely just really good game Okay, let me have a look here What else? Man, you found you're so fast. I did. Okay, I'm going to SummerSale Encore here. Okay, what else we got? You know what?

I'm going to see if they have... Man, some of these are pretty obscure. And not the Claire kind, the kind that nobody heard of. What the heck is Glasgow? It's a dollar. I like that that was a real ding, but it was short. I think that it was very...

I'm trying to work on the like palette of dings that are available. Yeah. All right. Well, why don't you finish that topic while I find something that I want to recommend to people, hopefully for a good price? Hitman Absolution for $2.50 is also actually pretty sick. Yeah, it seems like all the Hitman games are on like steep discount. all the older hitman games a dollar 35 for hitman blood money yeah absolution for 250 these are again canadian yeah um these are these are older hitman games like the graphics a little rough but if

you go to absolution absolution is not that old much more much more up to date so that's why i was kind of recommending absolution right um yeah that's pretty that's pretty sick yeah oh dude i okay It's definitely not as good of a deal as Tomb Raider 2016 for $3 or whatever that, $4 or whatever that price was. But I absolutely loved Dragon Age Origins. And it's $27 Canadian dollars. That's like 20 bucks. Dragon Age Origins is a fantastic game.

And you like own it forever now and no one can ever take it away from you, which is might be important because if you're like me, then you might put like 100, 200 hours into a character. Um, yeah, super awesome game. Really enjoyed the heck out of it. It's a little more casual compared to like, you know, Never Winter Nights to like some of the older, uh, sort of D&D.

Boom. Or, um, origin games. But yeah, it's, uh, it's a really enjoyable game. Boom. Deasex, Mankind Divided. I never played Mankind Divided. Is it good? Good game.

I liked it. Um, and like graphics. Like, I know we're looking at some of these games are a bit older. graphics on this are still going to be pretty good. So, fun fact. Yeah, Dan said it's okay. I'm not like overwhelmingly positive about this game, but I remember it enjoying it, at least for a while.

The only DiasX game I ever played was Deus X Invisible War, which apparently is the worst one. Yeah, so is getting punched. I enjoyed the crap out of it. I played this all the way through. I don't, I look, I, I, I, but then you're only looking up. If you had started with the first one,

And then you're going to play Mankind Divided? It's kind of not as good. I don't know, man. You're going to love Mankind Divided. That game's awesome. I don't know what to say. I enjoyed it. So long ago that I had kind of like, yeah, I mean, it's like playing System Shock.

It's like, I am too used to modern convenience. Yeah. I don't want to play a calculator. I tried to play System Shock, too. I tried to play one of the System Shock games after playing Bioshock because. like the reviews of Bioshock were like oh yeah

it's just like it's dumbed down ripped off system shock blah blah blah blah if you're a real gamer you do system shock and so I was like oh I mean I like

I like games I'll play a real game and I try to play system shock I was like okay I'm out maybe I like friendly normally normally normally normally normally

I enjoyed the heck of Bioshock you're my mom you're memo something like that I don't know yeah that game's hard to like

in modern day there's some mods that make it better whatever I enjoyed DeaSX Invisible War. I got it for free with like a GPU purchase or something. Remember GPUs coming with games? Yeah.

And like multiple games. That was cool. Anyway, G.O.G. Unlimited games. All the games. G.O.G. Go find a cool game. You'll have spent 25 US dollars and you could have Tomb Raider and Dragon Age Origins and that'll keep you busy

for like the next month or two. And you will own those games forever. It's pretty sick. It is fascinating to me how many how many Gooner games there are and how well they sell. It is constantly fascinated to me. I have all the filters turned off on Steam because I don't want to be bothered by the like, are you this old?

I've had my account long enough. Literally I've had my account long enough that you should know that I am old enough to see whatever I want. But then it also shows up in the recommendations. I'm sure there's some way I could tune it. But it's always under like top selling right now. There's some gooner game. and we jump over to GOG,

bestseller, very top. New releases, very top. Oh, what? There's a new what? There's a new, uh, Issaquibus? Sorry, I can't read it from here.

I was trying to pretend I knew what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, anyways, next, uh, next topic, I guess. Yeah. Try not.

I'm trying to find that which Rayman game I like played hours and hours and hours of on PC Was it like was it like the first one? What? Yeah, there's a bunch of Rayman games on on GOG.

Anyway, sorry, I'm, I'm, oh dude. They have the Batman games. How much is Arkham Asylum? Yeah, apparently I can tune my settings to Oh, okay, so there's a settings to show Nazi for work content and separate setting to hide games that are explicitly Nazi for work. So it would show The Witcher,

but it won't put Guna games in your feed. So I guess I need to go tune that. Arkham Asylum might be 15 bucks, US, which is probably... That's probably pretty good. I maybe try to see if you could catch it on sale, but you can always wish list it. Ah, Arkham Asylum's so good.

I love Arkham Asylum. The other ones just felt like kind of more Arkham Asylum, so I didn't really find myself getting that into them but yeah, Arkhamisle was awesome. And like, oh, oh man, Mark Hamill is the Joker. Oh, he's just so good. Oh, he's just so good. Okay.

What a performance. All right. What do you want to talk about next? Oh, wait, did you ever actually finish the valve driver? Yeah, whatever. They don't, they have Windows drivers, but they're not supporting it. They're not supporting it that much.

The whole doesn't support dual boot thing is definitely not an operating system little thing. That's a machine system. and blah, la, la, la, la, la. You can now use your Sony headphones as free real-time head tracker. Interesting for race and flight simulators. Developer Nicholas Slattery released Sony HeadTracker, free open source Windows app that taps into the spatial audio.

Oh, that makes sense. The spatial audio motion sensors already inside the Sony headphones, like the insert model number here and XM6, and turns them into real-time head trackers. It reads the gyroscope data Windows normally ignores and feeds it to open track, which works with over 200 PC games, including Microsoft Flight Simulator, Acetylcoursa, and Elite Dangerous. The XM4 and older won't work because they lack the sensors.

And AirPods are out because Apple locks head tracking behind its proprietary protocol. That's pretty cool. That's actually like... That could be a compelling reason to just abandon my AirPods if anyone else could get the ergonomics right for me. But then I was expecting my pro threes to eventually like be comfortable for me. They still aren't. The pro twos fit me better. So I might be looking for an alternative anyway because I don't think I can stick with these forever.

So as as competitors, you can't buy threes. No, I could go back to pro, I could go back to my pro twos. I literally still have them. But the battery life is not that great anymore because they're older now. And also, you know, you can buy new ones. though. As competitors you know make better products with better active noise cancellation whatever the pro twos are going to fall behind.

Yeah, fair enough. And so I'd be looking for if I were to move on from the pro threes which I tolerate. They're comfortable enough. I'd be looking for, I'd be looking wider. I'd be casting a wider net. Yep. The next topic I have a bone to pick. With me? With the world.

Okay. Maybe you. what did I do? You responded being like, oh, I guess we're just boomers. I don't agree. What? What are you talking about? Go to the next topic.

Oh, okay. So, last week, I complained that there was no way, or at least no easy way. I think I did kind of disclaim it, to sort your Steam library by date added in the desktop interface. I showed that I had found it in the big picture mode interface, but not here. And so I was like, well, we've got our filters, we've got sort by recent activity, we've got ready to play games, how the heck do I sort these by whatever? So you could sort them by like when you played them, but where the heck is when I bought

them? It turns out that it's here. Which is exactly why I don't agree. It's not there. Wait, so I thought someone sent me a screenshot. They sure did. Okay. Nope. Let's see how long it takes you two to figure this out. I was going to help and now I'm more interested in not.

Oh, yeah. Because I know where it is. It's that button, isn't it? Hold on, hold on. Manage. Can I, yeah, can I sort, no. Okay. I don't have steam on this computer.

I think I know what button it is. I'll keep it in my brain. Hold on, library. Okay, I'm going to try and figure it out. So the person in the tweet said to click the home button. So you could click the home button on. under library. Cog?

No. Sorry, home button? Yeah, under library. They said to click the home button. Under,

under library. Oh. Yep, so that didn't do anything. Collections. Create a new collect, no. No.

Do you want to see it? Hold on. No, not yet. All right. Okay. Okay. All right,

fine. Show it to me. It's not. It's just, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Don't, no, no,

don't show me yet. All games. Hold on. Here we go. Here we go. There it is. There you go. Data added to library. Okay, I knew I was going to find it. Wait, what's all that stuff on top? Like, I don't have those. What's new? No, I don't have those shelves on mine. At least games in Playnext? At least at home, yeah. They're on mine at home and on this computer here.

Interesting. I just collapsed. I just have my all games. So that's something. How did you even collapse? I'm not sure what I just did. I'm anyway, so I think these guys

are boomers So the reason Luke is The boomer thing Back in my day Steam was green I don't I can't do any of this

Okay we should probably give them The context for that I responded on Twitter saying oh I guess We just had a boomer moment Not being able to find it But you know what That's not a great interface

Bro it's below the fold Yeah It's okay My main thing Is where I'm looking for it Is up here Yeah That's where I sort

That's where my games are. I want it as like either a filter here or an option on one of these or something like that. If I wanted to view all my games as giant box art, then I would be in big picture mode where I do know how to find it. Yeah, going all the way down there is... And then clicking this thing and then going down to here. Yeah, yeah, just give me a better sword over on the left and then I think everyone's happy. Yeah, so I don't, I don't... It's below the fold and it's in a weird spot.

You can reorder the shelves. Sure. Yeah, but by default, it's below the fold. Yeah. Default behavior matters. Like, I remember back when I used to do more like Android phone reviews, I'd have people. That's so cool. I didn't know this was a thing.

Someone make like a skin. Nokey linked steam brew old steam. Yes. That's cute. This looks so sick, actually. The buttons. I remember the buttons. Back when I did a lot of like Android phone reviews, I'd take,

a bunch of flack for evaluating them the way that they come out of the box and using the default settings or that type of navigation or the default keyboard or whatever like why are you why are you not just like immediately downloading a custom launcher and why are you not immediately like rooting it and getting the most out of it it's like dude i'm not trying to make like your favorite android phone maker look bad or anything but these are things that most people are not going to change So these are things that are important. Default behavior does matter is pretty much all I'm trying to say here. So what is this exactly?

Old steam. Yeah, but what is it? Infinite hiatus, though. I don't know. Oh, infinite, not indefinite. Yeah. Oh. Infinite hiatus.

The glory days of the skin are behind it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, this might not be a thing. All right, bummer. That's cool, well, it's a cool little project. Looks sweet. I miss fun U.

U.S. like that. a lot of you eyes these days are very, very, very boring. We had a conversation on a went show a while ago. There's that, like, you know, websites from 2006 thing. And they're all so much more unique looking. And, like, even just looking from one to the other, they all look very, very unique. And these days, like, every web store looks the same.

Every info website looks the same. Every wiki for every game looks the same. This is so cool. It's so cool. And with the power of modern, like, like CSS and stuff, like, my God, you could do so much. I mean, you could run Half-Life 2 in your browser. Yeah, like the things you can do with browsers these days are amazing.

And it's, yeah. And the problem is, I don't even blame, I don't blame the developers. I don't blame the managers. I'm not blaming the companies. It's people are following like user behavioral data. People are making the things that the people ultimately maybe not say they want, but their actions indicate that they want.

It is what it is. You guys are bored because they need to work on desktop and mobile. Desktop and mobile and tons of different versions of everything in between. That's a big part of the problem. And what's this? Is this desktop or mobile? Because I can sure move it. Well, no, it matters.

It does. It matters. It's a way smaller screen than what I would expect someone to be using on a desktop. Yeah. Experiences are different from device to device, even if they're like the same version. And I think it's a legitimate question. And some of them are going to have touch screens.

Some of them won't. I wasn't even... It kind of needs to be pretty okay at supporting both of those things. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons why modern websites are honestly really boring. And I don't know if we're going to be able to get away from it, to be honest. You know what else? we're not going to be able to get away from.

LTT Labs, publishing some banger articles recently. Dude. This is so cool. This one did super well, actually. Risen AI Halo is AMD's new little AI dev kit that's meant to take on the DGX Spark from NVIDIA. And I'd say to a lesser degree, like the Mac Studio. The hardware is not necessarily as competitive with something like a Mac Studio.

there's just not enough bandwidth. But in terms of the pricing, especially compared to what the Mac Studio costs now, and in terms of the software that's included, to make it just brain dead simple to get up and running with local LLMs, it's a pretty cool little piece of kit. So I read through all this,

enjoyed the heck out of it earlier this week. And there's another first. treat for me to enjoy because I actually just made my way through LLM quantization part one because there's some pretty, there's some reasonably thick, go watch this and also go read this and then come back reference material from it. So it took me a little while to remember, oh yeah, I haven't finished like doing all of my homework and reading that article. So I actually just finished part one recently.

And here we go. quantization part two is up so if you guys don't know lTT labs.com doing some actually really amazing content they also have companion articles for some of our videos here's the short circuit they did a little bit more sort of performance benchmarking for the labs article because we were in a real hurry to get that thing unboxed and published and then we ultimately sat on it after it was done editing it was a whole thing anyway don't worry about it the point is uh labs team can take their time. They did some testing.

Oh my God, the battery life sucks. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be great, but what the heck? Oh, man. All right. I mean,

yeah, bright display, though. So that's, that's something. Cool. It's just pirate. Yeah, that's,

yeah, that's, uh, check out these. That's a fair thing to say about some stuff that's going on right now. And then swipe to the right to see the second one and zoom into the bottom left-10 corner to see where it all came from. But those stats are for, I'm going to publish those, but those stats are for that AI Risenbox thing. The Risen A.I. Halo dev kit. It's very interesting to me what's getting views. Because the lab site has been having fun with the article. We recognized. We heard you, you know, okay, product page, product review. Nobody cares. All right. Understood. So we've been working on articles. Articles have been more fun anyways. And it's been really, really interesting seeing stuff that people are interested in. And it seems pretty random sometimes. Like there was a 45 watt power brick from a bit ago that just banged. People loved that for some reason. We didn't get crazy viewership on it. But the sentiment around, the does the Belkin cable charge the Nintendo Switch to faster,

just even though it's like Nintendo branded thing. The sentiment around this was really positive and fun to read. But yeah, you release an article on that AIRisenbox and people do be clicking on it and staying and reading and coming from different parts of the internet, but it's it's fun. And I saw some negative stuff because it's talking about AI in general, is fair enough, but I think basically anything that is going to progress the ability for people to run things locally instead of just funneling all of their money into these big companies,

stealing everything from everyone is better than the alternative. So I'm pretty down with it personally. Hey, speaking of which, Mid Journey is trying to flip the script in the copyright lawsuits that lawsuit that has been brought against them by Disney Universal and Warner Brothers who sued last year over their AI generating images of characters like Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, Superman, and Batman. In a new motion, oops, Mid Journey is asking the court to force these studios to reveal how much they use AI behind closed doors, including AI business plans, training datasets, model weights, and even board presentations about AI. strategy. Mid Journey argues that if the studios are internally training image generating AI on unlicensed copyrighted data for things like storyboarding, then that proves that it's industry custom to do exactly

what these studios are suing Mid Journey for. A magistrate judge already ruled in June that the studios only have to disclose AI use in consumer-facing content, and Mid Journey is now asking the district judge to overturn that limit, arguing that it lets the studios cherry-pick document that support their case while hiding the ones that don't. Midgernerney also wants every prompt that studio employees have ever typed into MidGurney itself, along with the outputs. The stakes are massive on both ends. The studios are seeking up to $150,000 per infringed work,

which across potentially millions of images could be a company-ending number for Mid-Journey. And the studio's attorneys are calling this discovery push a fishing expedition, insisting they aren't trying to stop AI or shut Mid-Journey down, just stop it from reproducing their characters. As the first major Hollywood versus AI case, whatever precedent gets set here is going to ripple across dozens of similar lawsuits pending against Open AI, Anthropic Stability, and others.

Our discussion question is, if it comes out that the studios are training their own AI on unlicensed content while suing Mid-Journey for the same thing, does that actually change whether my journey was right or not or does it just mean that both are wrong this will be a short discussion just both are wrong just definitely both are wrong the amount of like yeah the amount of theft involved with AI stuff is mind-blowing um and they are wrong for it and we'll see how that goes yeah i don't have a ton to add it feels like a very like i don't remember what all the letters in the acronym mean but it feels like a very extreme

accelerationist mindset to be like, we'll just do all the stealing and potentially get our entire company burned. But as long as this thing happens, then we're fine with it, which is like, I actually guarantee you there are people that think like that. Oh, yeah. So like, 100%. Yep. I, like I, it can be comforting to tell ourselves, surely nobody could be that stupid is probably a bought account. but I mean I I I I I hesitate to bring this up again um oh no you could not I don't know what it is but you could not yeah feels too late it totally isn't but I'm reminded of that conversation about Tesla with the finance bro oh oh yeah sure whatever um well no um like oh is it gotten back someone in my life

Watch his Wandshow and knows the person whose birthday party that was and referred them to the section and they asked me about it They were like you mean name right. I'm like Oh Anyway, but that was like meeting that was like meeting Some of the things that they said sounded like the kind of thing that if I wanted to self-suv I would tell myself, yes, I would tell myself, yes, I would tell myself, yes, I but it's probably a bot if I was interacting with this person online. Like the, it's like that Park Ranger quote,

you know, where the line between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans is, is not a line, it's more of an overlap. And I feel like we've, we're well past that, where the line between the most obnoxious or, or dumbest humans and the smartest AI chatbots is,

uh, is like this, you know? Like there's a thick, thick overlap with a couple of C's. Yeah, this is, um, this is what I was talking about. Effective accelerationism. EACC. And I thought every letter might stand for something, but no, it's just.

Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Like those kind of people are going to be fine. Well, you know, I mean, they're probably walking away with it with tons of money anyways. company goes down. It doesn't mean their personal bank accounts go down. Yeah, that's the whole thing when you just like raise capital. Yeah. And then it doesn't work out. It's like you still got paid for what for the work you were doing. Yeah. And like you should.

Like that's the whole point of raising capitals that you can afford to be paid to work. Like you can, your value can be appreciated in monetary terms while you work on something that presumably is important enough that somebody gave you money to work on it. And that's fine. You're seeing a lot of the stuff where one of these companies go down and all the people are just like immediately scattered to other So like if Mid Journey goes down, it does not mean that there will not be another image generation company. And it does not mean that any of the theft that Mid Journey engaged in never happened. And now that it hasn't been distilled out to other ones as well. So like a lot of it, I think a lot of the plan legitimately was to make it so that this thing is just on rails and you're not going to be able to stop it. Tim, Tim, Tim, 000 X3 says, so are you saying that AI has reached human level intelligence?

A low bar, but I agree. no, I'm not saying that AI has intelligence. I'm saying that in terms of like quality of engagement through text on the internet, or like, how do I, or like, like, good takes versus bad takes, like just knowing what to say next, I can't tell the difference between, in terms of like the quality of the statement of a very, cutting edge bot versus a very not as cutting edge human brain. But however, that human brain can do so many things that a chat bot can't do today and

looks like is a complete dead end for at least the modern paradigm, the modern LLM paradigm. That's what I'll say. What else we want to talk about today? Oh, Sony's being sued for nearly half a billion dollars. by a Dutch nonprofit after they announced that PlayStation discs are done in 2028. I... I don't know how that's going to work. Yeah, I don't know what...

Well, okay, here we go. Let's get through it. Let's get through it, okay? So, Sony's facing a lawsuit in the Netherlands, claiming that Sony's push towards an all-digital PlayStation ecosystem would give it too much control over game pricing and hurt consumers. The lawsuit argues that ending discs in 2028 would eliminate the used game market, and leave players with no real alternative

to buying through the PlayStation store, giving Sony effective control over prices. Yeah, that sounds about right. I also suspect they did it now because their current console is fairly old and they don't want this to be a new cycle around their new console. That's right.

The Dutch Consumer Group says that removing physical media and resale options would reduce consumer choice. Weak in competition could ultimately mean higher prices for PlayStation users. I had, there's a, in our discussion questions is what apparently someone put down as a Linus made question, sure.

Could Sony solve this by just putting an ironclad clause in their terms of service that gives digital asset owners the same rights as physical asset owners? If they did that, would this whole conversation just completely go away? I mean, the conversation about them being big, mean guys might go away, but their whole money situation will get astronomically worse. We've talked about this before. the ability to pass around digital games is not equivalent to the ability

to pass around physical games. They are completely different beasts. If everyone on the internet can just hand around digital games, the barrier of entry of doing that is so low that it will actually have a notable impact on game developers. Whether you're okay with that or not is not the conversation we're having, to be clear. The conversation

we're having is just pointing out that that is a wildly different beast. What if? What if? Okay. hear me out what if you couldn't lend games but they allowed you to sell them same problem and that whoa hold on hold on i'm going somewhere with this and the game developer gets a cut maybe not a full maybe not a not the cut of a full game but they get 10% something like that just reducing their revenue but that is interesting because that's kind of like the

does that does that does that does that does that does that make you less angry does that does that make, does that make game developers maybe more open to this? Could we get, could we, could we reach a compromise that everyone's unhappy with? I have no idea to be honest. I can't, uh, posture as a game developer. Um, I think I would also have a very different tune depending on what type of game developer I was. Am I a big AAA game developer? Am I a little indie game developer?

Um, if I made mecha chameleon, do I care? If I made Mech a Camellian, maybe I would actually prefer that it worked that way because then maybe at least there wouldn't be more people playing knockoffs on Roblox of my game than there are people playing my game on Steam. So maybe that would actually make me happier. I'm not sure. This is one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbs lines. Tangential news. years of Chinese court rulings on inherited game accounts and in-game items are now only are only now gaining attention in the West after Reddit user

Slowered something shared translated case summaries with help from his wife, a Chinese lawyer and certified translator. One old ruling involved a valuable sword from an MMO that after its owner died was ruled to have real economic value and should be sold with the proceeds split 50-50 between the deceased legal wife and his in-game wife. What? Since both contributed to owning it. Oh no! I didn't think it was going that way.

Dan, get that two can out of here. Whoa. I cannot anymore. That was the line. I've heard of work wives and work husbands, and I thought that crap was ridiculous. And then no. I mean, we had wow weddings. Yeah, we also had Wow mounts.

Do you know about that story? Is that just sex in Wow? There was a lady in Burning Crusade when flying mounts were introduced. Flying mounts, Epic Flying was incredibly expensive. And she wanted an epic flying mount. And she was like, well, you can mount me if you give me the gold to buy an epic flying mount. It's an old Craigslist post. As far as my understanding goes, it was completely real.

It's like legendary. Oh, no, I was joking. Oh my God. No, this is, yeah, I'm pretty sure this is real. I'm actually pretty sure it was real. I mean, okay, hear me out. Hear me out. Is it really any more selling your body than if you did a bunch of like backbreaking labor

for the wow gold to buy an epic flying mount? I sell my body to Linus and then I can go home and play wow by myself. We all do that. There is a prostitution under capitalism. is what we all do. You know, I'm going to do this. There we go. Yeah, that'll teach you.

Hello, I need 5,000 world of gold. Okay, for my epic flying mount, in return, you can mount me. If I have an account on the Laughing Skull server, and I want the 5,000 before we do anything, we can make the trade at your place since I can't host. Because I'm having a lot of dumb guys message me who clearly don't have the gold.

Make sure you send a picture of yourself and a screenshot of your character with the 5,000 gold. I will be checking armory profiles. Thanks. I play a level 70 night elf druidman. Prefer someone who's into role playing. I have a costume. Anyone will do as long as you have the gold.

I would also be okay with a woman too as long as you have the gold, also not averse to the idea of group and anal. Please send a pick and be real and drug and disease free with 5,000 gold on the Laughing Skull server. It is not okay to contact them about other commercial interests.

Yep. See, when I turned 16, Yeah. Some, some, the rich, the super rich kids would get a car. Yeah. My dad got me an epic flying mount. And I, I didn't even have to sell my body on Craigslist. Really?

How much was an epic flying mount? It's, it's a little, I mean, don't take this. Because your family didn't have a ton of money. Was she for like not very much? Not her. Not her. He bought, he actually bought me an in-game. No, no, no, I know.

I just mean... I just mean... I'm farmed gold in-game for my brother and I and bought us both... Oh, so he didn't like... No. Buy it. So, so...

But how... Sorry, when was this? How much money was it? Gold. No, no. I know, I know. But what was 5,000 gold in real money? Oh, back then I have no idea.

Well, I guess what I'm trying to ask is like... That would have been 2006. Okay, so... I think 2006. What was 5,000 gold worth in real U.S.D in 2000? in 2006. Like no, no

wow gold. So it would have been 2007, sorry, 2007. Like, I don't, I don't know. I don't know

if gold buying was, I'm sure it was a thing, I guess, but. I don't know, AI overview. Okay, hold on,

hold on, memory insufficient. That sounds like a pretty geeky website. Okay, do we have U.S. Oh, good Lord. Hold on.

US, can I, okay, give me, give me US dollars. Okay, now you know what, let's go, let's go dollar sign. Okay, give me a dollar sign. Two-factor authentication, blah, blah, blah, blah, maintenance costs for something, something,

seven per year, okay. Not tradables. Okay, I don't think we're gonna find it here. Wow to USDA, wow to USDA converter and calculator? All? Okay, here we go. C converter calculator.

Oh. Oh, this is just some stupid crypto thing. For crying a lot. You know what? I'm just going to go with the AI answer. It may not be the right answer, but early in 2007 gold sold for about $50,200 per thousand gold.

So wait, we're talking like $250 to $500? And then inflation. It's been a while. Is that a good price for paid relations? I have no idea. No context for this. person, brother. I was walking up the Vegas trip with someone who was a troll, who I'm not going to name, but you probably know who they are. And to embarrass me because I was very shy and like not, you know,

worldly, so to speak. This was, this was earlier on before they had kind of made Vegas a little bit more kid friendly. So this is, yeah, it was not when we first started going. In my early days of NCIX, And just to embarrass me, they yelled out very loud. Like, how much is it, you know, sexual act? Was there a response? It was less than I thought. So that was interesting to know. Hasn't come up again since then, but, you know, hey, my luck could change, so good to know.

Anyways, Luke and Linus, are you to each other's in-game wives or who would come to mind as your in-game wife? Who's your in-game wife, Luke? A lot of my gaming these days is solo, so maybe I'm just, you know, maybe I'm, yeah, exactly. I was trying to think of how to even call that. Leftina or Richel? Yeah, maybe I'm one of those. Yeah. Okay, our other discussion question for this topic was, if LMG started a physical media library and allowed staff to use it, do you think that would go over well? It's actually something that I have talked about before because it came up

that it would be pretty convenient to have like an LMGplex for times when we're just like making content. And we want to put on some piece of media. and it's very inconvenient to go get a Blu-ray. And if we just had like, like, remember when the US dollar used to be backed by the gold standard, if we had like R-Plex server was backed by the blue standard.

So as long as there's a Blu-ray and as long as only one person's watching it at once, then, you know, whatever. And so I did actually kick the idea around of having like an on-prem vault of Blu-rays. You would throw away all the packaging, throw away all the, like, art and everything.

People internally take it. I don't care. But so you basically just have towers and towers of discs for your like, because theoretically, as long as they're working at the office regularly, they have to come here every day. They could conceivably go get the disc and could conceivably go take it home. So what's the difference? In fact, I think we've even talked about this on Wancho before.

I think maybe. And I think we came to the conclusion that it's closer, but it's not quite the barrier that physical media is. and therefore, you know, probably still piracy. See, even that doesn't do it. I was going to say, what if you had to, like, go take the Blu-ray and put it on your desk before you left work? Yeah, I mean, but you can't enforce that.

You can't enforce it. And it's still not the barrier because Blu-ray players are going to become a problem. Honestly, I don't remember if I talked about this, blah. I don't remember if I talked about this on WAN or if I talked about this to Emma. I've never owned one. well yeah i guess you just yeah fair enough um well i have a drive yeah i've ripped media yeah i stopped

bothering at a certain point because i was like why am i even doing this if as long as i had the thing then what difference does it make i'll just download it there are people that want to play it directly off though and a lot of those people's people's my goodness a lot of those people have been using consoles for a while now yeah i've never owned a playstation and with next gen consoles probably not having disc drives that's not quite true i have a playstation too but i didn't own it when it was was current. My friend bought a PlayStation 3 and gave me his old PS2 because it was backwards compatible and he had no use for it. Sorry.

That's cool. Just clarification. I like to be honest. I like to be up front transparency. With the easiest route and most common route for people to have those drives being gone. And very recently on Wanshow, us talking about how a bunch of companies that made them are stopping making them at the same time.

Physical community is going to be a tough spot. I suspect there will be like one or two brands that are able to hang on just continuing to make players. Polaroid still makes film for crying out loud. So, yeah. So I'm sure it'll be okay, but it won't be as easy to get into. Also, there was a comment on last Wancho that I made the Apollo 11 movie thing up.

What I'm what I'm screwing up when I say it and why I got a little weird about it last time is because I keep calling it a movie. It's, it's a doc. That's why I kept thinking you meant Apollo 13. I know. but like... Yeah, no, no, but we found it last week, so I know what you were talking about. There was more than one comment

where people are like, oh, why are you trying to like cover up a mistake? It's not a mistake. I bought this. Yeah, relax. I had to go to, uh, I bought it online, but I got it shipped to me.

I had to go to a used place because this, as much as it's well rated, is not anywhere near as well known as most mainline movie releases. Like Apollo 13. Yeah. So I couldn't buy a new one of it. I had to buy a used one,

someone said or you're just weird yeah i would take that that's fine i have no problem with that okay forget the in-game wife i didn't make it up i'm sorry i'm totally changing the subject here who would inherit your steam library oh if you could leave it to someone when do i die um when your heart stops beating no like stupid question no it's a good question no i don't just kidding like am i dying no no no no so you die now or is this this i mean you have to write your will now so you don't get to decide after you die. As soon as the Elder Scroll 6 finishes installing. Damn, that would be so disappointing.

Isn't it ironic? Or lucky, we don't know yet. A little too ironic. Right now, I think it would be my brother. Okay, yeah, yay. And part of that reason is because anything that I have already planned to effectively give to his kids is just going to him.

Oh, that makes sense. And then he can arbiter it. But yeah, I would say, yeah. I, man, I don't know. How would I leave that to one person? Like I, with that sword, the in-game sword. Like selling it and then and then splitting the proceeds. Like, that kind of makes sense.

Sorry, Tim said, I'll give you $250 if you leave it to me in your will. I'll give you the $250 now. honestly it sounds like a good deal i think you should take it i don't think he'd kill you over 250 there's you can't lose i'd have to like show him proof that's a great deal why not here's my last will in testament to tim to tim i leave my student library x3 yeah i mean yeah sure i you'll you'll just have to you'll put you'll have to put like uh I don't know, maybe you could, maybe you could like, you could like roll up a password, like a recovery code

and then just like embed in your skin so that when you're dead, I mean, it won't hurt, they'll take it out. They'll take it out. And they'll give it to Tim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he could recover the account. Sounds like. G-dub says, do I hear $500? Hold on a second. There's a bidding war starting. Brandmo says 400. Mr. McQueen, 450. Kirkland's signature, 450. My, my Steam account has got a lot of games on it, you know.

The brand mo says $600. No key. $666, Kanzaro, $1,000. A thousand dollars. Would you take $1,000 to put some random from float plane in your will to have your steam account? It's still going up. I don't think I should answer that. I mean, that's a pretty good amount of money.

You could afford multiple... You could afford half a steam machine. You could afford to give someone two epic flying mounts for that. or get them, wait, hold on. You could afford to, hold on, you could afford to buy enough wow gold to get two real world mounts. Hold on. And then they would both have epic flying mounts.

Yeah. Right. You're an epic flying mount distributor. You could get them some chicken too maybe? No, it's not needed in this case. Right, you don't need it. Yep. That's what the flying mounts are for.

That chicken flies. You want a K truck? Oh, dude. Now we're getting into like assets. Okay. Wait, someone's offering you a K truck? Noki's offering me 1,500 and a 5090 S. Well on, Tim seems like the most serious, though.

He says, $500, I will fly to Vancouver. Linus can make a short out of it. Okay, now I'm interested. Oh, my goodness. man. All right. I think we can move on. Okay, this one's funny.

I mean, come to Whaleen. This is hilarious, okay? There's my, we'll talk about it. Come to Whaleen. Bloomberg reports, Netflix viewers are abandoning shows after one season. Netflix's biggest hits are losing more than half of their audience after one season. And I don't know, the paywall came up, but I'm pretty sure I read more about this somewhere before.

and apparently their executives are trying to figure out why. So the internet had some ideas for why. Maybe it's because you get invested in a Netflix show and then they just don't fucking finish it. Maybe it's because they do a season of a show and it's like a handful of episodes and you're hooked, you're riveted. And then the next season comes out like years later. and you've moved on with your life.

So I think that's true. I also think, and if this is completely true, I think this would have happened years ago. But in the era of everyone watches things on TV, things would just kind of show up and people would lean towards different options more, right? Now there is so many options. And you're starting to see this on YouTube

where back in the day, you used to be able to do series on YouTube and people would retune in all the time they would watch the follow up episodes and that is rough now yeah playlists get like guys no traction like I will see occasionally

I'll see someone talk about like oh yeah oh hey can you guys do a playlist for tech house actually I thought I thought we had one oh yeah here it is can you guys do a playlist for tech dude dude nobody clicks on this I don't I can't

bring up the metrics right now because I'm not signed into the right account on this computer. But like literally no one tunes in to that. Playlists. Yeah, no. Yeah. But even any form of multi-episode content, like this is, I wouldn't even call this. The most serialized thing we've done in years, but it's not even quite. I wouldn't even call this multi-episode.

I mean, it's got an intro. This is multiple episodes on the same topic. This is multiple pieces of content on the same topic. It has. you're not really posing this as like episode two it has a theme song yeah but you're not posing this as episode whatever but it has a it has a like look at it's a it's a it's a it's a show it's an episode come on look at it i don't know it's not the same thing in my mind i understand what you're saying and i don't even think you're wrong but something about it is something about it is off for me and i don't know what yeah

maybe it's just the packaging maybe it's just that you guys aren't including an episode number and stuff like that. But I feel like one of the reasons why you're doing that. It's because it doesn't work. It's because it doesn't work. Yeah. And it would probably deter people, if anything. It's like lifetime playlist views. Yeah. 87,000. That's actually more than I thought. Um, and it's still very low. That's still, yeah, like not, not a, that, that's not going to move the needle for us at, at our scale. Out of 7.3 million total views. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Good chat. Yeah, episodic stuff is tough these days. People just want to binge the hell out of something and then move on. Yep.

What else we got here? Hey, this is fun. This is another, this is another we get to go on an adventure and try something topic. Knockoff is a new Chrome extension, and Luke's going to install it right now, from Josh Pigford

that claims to filter knockoff items. and junk brands from your Amazon search results. The extension currently works on Amazon.com and dot com.b and lets you label. I will not install it right now. Oh, you won't. Nope. Oh. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. I did. Okay, you got it. Thanks to Threat Locker, which is a really good piece of software. That is actually good. And it's really good that it said no to him installing a random... I wouldn't want this to be able to be randomly installed. Browser extension.

Browser extension. are a very fantastic way to exfiltrate a very large amount of data. Yeah, so we're not endorsing this thing. We're just trying it live and hopefully not compromising our infrastructure. Anyway, the point is, what it lets you do is label, dim, or totally hide sort of random suspect items, as well as giving you the option to hide sponsored listings entirely or even filter out established Chinese brands if that's something that you feel the need to do. it seems a little hit or miss

here we can look at the results for no because I don't think it's going to work because I don't have the extension so you'll have to click on them it seems a little hit or miss Jordan who prepared this topic gave us a couple links to click on

like dog bed where it worked pretty well and SDXC card where it only blocked one of the dozens of gigastone results and Jordan also said from my quick testing, it only works on search results, i.e. your URL looks like Amazon.com slash s question mark k equals. If you're just clicking around, it doesn't really do anything. Our discussion question, while Luke's going ahead and installing it, is where does

an extension like this fit in the ad blocking conversation? I'd say for sponsored items, it fits very well with the ad blocking conversation. But in terms of filtering out brands that I'm not interested in? I feel like that's, I feel like I'm not even costing them anything. I'm just making sure that my eyes don't have to see stuff that I knew I wasn't going to want to buy anyway. Like just give me like a JBL Bluetooth speaker rather than a random one. Okay, so you've got it set to dim items from like rando brands. I can control it here. Okay, let's have a look. So let's do hidden maybe. No, no, I want to see dim because I want to see what it's, Okay.

What it's filtering out. So, okay, so E.H. Yoga brand, it gets rid of. But the bed sure orthopedic dog bed is allowed. Who decides? I don't know. It's a good question because to me, sun hair bed doesn't sound any worse than pock blue. Hmm.

Likely pseudo brand on the known pseudo brand list. Then you can control it. Report is real brand. Cool. I mean, that's cool. Oh, okay. So we're in the very early stages of this maybe being. more crowdsourced thing.

This could be pretty sick, genuinely. I almost feel like I need a browser now for shopping that I can add a bunch of add-ons to that I only really use for shopping. Because like, we talked recently about how vinegar is like maybe becoming a thing. Yeah. Which is a- Go ahead. It's a project I've talked about someone hopefully taking for a while and somebody did

and they're working on it. And they seem to talk about, like, they have a privacy policy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But extensions are just kind of spooky. Now, if you're someone who has a, whoa, bug almost flew directly to my eyeball, if you're someone who has just a billion extensions installed anyways and you don't really care, which, to be honest, I think is most people, then just maybe go for it. And who cares? And you can have vinegar and you can have knockoff, whatever installed.

and then your shopping experience is going to actually be pretty cool, I think, with the combination. That's pretty sick. But my God, browser extensions, I can just read your data is crazy. Like, yeah, people be like all mad about Windows Recall

and then meanwhile installing browser extensions. Let me just install every extension ever. Yeah. It's a really funny thing, how we how we selectively apply our principles on privacy and I mean inclusive of myself. Everyone's got their lines. Yeah. And everyone's got their blind spots where they just didn't think of it or the convenience

outweighs the risk. Right now for I use Chrome for work. I have a ton of different work profiles and I find profile switching in Chrome to be unmatched. but for personal, I only really have one profile I use often. So I just run one browser genuinely, generally. And usually it's Zen, which is a Firefox spin-off. But lately I've been poking around with Waterfox as well.

And knowing that there's like 10 billion different Firefox and Chromium iterations, you could have different browsers with different add-on loadouts for different things. Totally. It might genuinely be reasonable. to have like with the current state of shopping. It might be reasonable to have a shopping browser where you have some of these different add-ons enabled because like, I mean, that's pretty sweet.

It is difficult these days, honestly. And it's like everywhere. Yeah. Walmart's website, Best Buy's website. So many websites are like... They're just marketplaces now. And they're unusable. Yeah.

They're just so full of just like, spin the wheel. to get a discount and, oh, are you sure you want to navigate here? And just go away and let me just find the thing. I'm trying to give you money. Get out of my way. It's wild, dude. Using derivatives of Firefox still absolutely supports Firefox. I just want to flag that real quick.

And the container tabs is just not as good as chromium profiles, at least for me personally. And I will continue to use Chrome for work. I've always had a very specific line. that I can have my personal preferences for things, but if it's slower or gets in the way of productivity and I'm using it for work, I will not use it. I will use the work standard thing.

So I use Chrome for work. Okay, no key sent something over. I'll bite. I'll click the link. It's called how I experience web today.com. Okay. I searched something. This shows me something.

Okay. Oh, God. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay. Block for sure. No thanks. Oh, I love this.

This is great. This is really funny. This is a static ad. An article I want to read. Yeah. How can I help? Oh, my God. There's actually not enough interruptions in this content.

There should be way more ads. Yeah. Dude, there's a... Honestly, this isn't enough ads. There's a, there's a new site that keeps showing up in my Google feed that gets me to click it pretty often that will replay video ads forever after you close them. It'll just keep reopening them no matter how many times you close them. It's like, dude, I closed the ad.

I am trying to read the article. Please move. Oh, when you go to close the tab, it does this. That's actually pretty good. That's pretty funny. My little project of having no infinite scrolling on my phone has been. really interesting. Yeah?

It's, it's been really interesting because now that I'm at zero, I never felt this until I got to zero, but now that I'm at zero, every once in a while, my brain will go like, all right,

give me some of that, just junk dopamine. And I'll pull the phone out and go to scroll on something and there's nothing I can go to. Yeah. And I have the little like brain moment where it's like,

I'll have to find something else to do. Let me go do. do, let me go scroll something and it's like, no, I have to do something else. And it is always better. Every time, I've never been like, oh man, I really wish I spent the last hour just scrolling stuff. I won't remember ever. Like, I've never had that reaction. And it's been, it's been interesting. But it's like, it has to be defended, which is a weird thing. Like, I had to install, I don't know what it was recently. I think it was X or something because I had to check a message.

X going to give it to you. And I just, you have to uninstall it right after I do the thing. It's, it's, I have like a single purpose. Okay, I am going into this. I'm checking a DM. I'm responding to the DM. I am uninstalling the application. There's no, you can't leave it there, whatever.

Because that moment when your brain's like, let me do the thing, it has to not be able to. Yeah. That's the trick. And it, you, I, like, I'm, I'm kind of over the whole, um, time limits thing. because they're all too easy to ignore. I've watched people that I've talked to about doing this repeatedly just click the,

no, I'll take 10 more minutes or whatever that is able to be easily done in like basically every app that has the time limit thing. Are you wearing the Google FitWoop thing? It's, it's, uh, yeah, the Google Fitbit Zero or whatever it's called. Yeah. It's like the one wearable I've been able to consistently wear. Interesting.

And this is a man that couldn't even wear pants to wear. work. Yeah. It's pretty impressive. I am very surprised I haven't lost it yet. I don't suspect it'll make it too much longer. Nice. But yeah, it's been pretty okay. It's not amazing. Cool. And they try to sell you on AI stuff constantly. Nice. But it's fine. I'm using it basically as a sleep and step tracker and it's doing totally fine at both of those things. And I'm not subscribed to anything or getting any AI stuff or whatever. Dude, it's so annoying that you have to have the meta app in order to use their smart glasses because it will just ping you. You can't really turn off notifications entirely because there's like stuff you might need to do. Like it might have a sync error when ingesting your

video or whatever. But I was using it for like a family vlog video recently. We're actually going to put that channel live pretty soon. Okay. And so I like had to use the app and it's just like pinging me about random stuff and it's just like garbage AI slop all over it and it's just so annoying. Anyway, hey, on the subject of privacy, the EU is now mandating that every new car sold has to have an advanced driver distraction warning or ADDW device, which uses a camera to track your gaze. This will be true as of July 7th under the final phase of the general safety regulation.

So in practice, this means a small infrared camera near the steering wheel that tracks your eyes, head position, and your gaze. look away from the road for more than three and a half seconds if you're above 50 kilometers an hour or six seconds at lower speeds and the car will escalate through visual, audio, and haptic warnings until you look back at the road. It activates automatically above about 20 kilometers an hour, and while you can switch it off manually, it reenables every time you start the car. This rule has technically applied to newly designed models since 2024, and then July 7th closed the loophole for everything else. The good news is the privacy protections, at least on paper, are actually pretty decent. The regulation requires processing in a closed loop inside the vehicle. It explicitly bans facial recognition and biometric identification.

It forbids the data being made available to third parties and requires it to be deleted immediately after processing. The problem is enforcement. Yeah, we're learning a lot about that over the last two years and change. There is no law that nobody, if nobody is willing to enforce it. There's no independent audit mechanism to verify that any auto maker actually complies, no defined retention window, and this lands in an industry where a 23 Mozilla review found that roughly 84% of car brands share or sell driver data. Early real-world impressions... Well, yes, that's true.

It's a dumb car. Early real-world impressions are mixed. Belgian outlet Go-Car tested an XP-7-plus and found that it flagged a driver for glancing at scenery on an empty highway, And one Ford Puma renter described distraction warnings every 10 minutes with the alerts themselves becoming the distraction. On the other side, the EU estimates that distraction plays a role in 5 to 25% of crashes and projects the full safety package will save over 25,000 lives by 2038. Well, I don't necessarily agree because, I mean, if the warnings themselves are a distraction. Dude, it is so flippin obnoxious how often my car will just like wrench myself. steering wheel away from me. This was exactly what I was going to talk about. I drive Emma's car.

Yeah. And it has like lane keep assist and stuff. There was an area near our place that was under construction for a while. And it had cones in a certain area that did not follow the road lines. And the car would try to throw me into the cones all the time, which had workers behind it. The car was trying to throw itself into people. Like, no, I hate it so much. It might be better for some people, maybe, but like, my God. Not good. Oof, that happened with my mom's car while I was avoiding a cyclist. Yeah, I don't like things like lane, lane assist and whatnot.

I know people that do, I know a fair amount of people that do. I know people that should use it. Sure. There's some pretty bad drivers out there. Yeah, but like, dang, man. Oh, you know what, no, we'll do that one later. Oh, oh, sponsors, right. Okay, oh, we've got some really good topics.

Sorry, I got distracted. The show is brought to you by Tishiba. Really? Oh, hi, Tashiba. I don't think you've ever sponsored WANN show before. Nice to have you around. Hello. Your business needs to have a place to store and backup data and files

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Tashiba works with a wide range of NAS system manufacturers to extensively test their drives and ensure compatibility with most NASS systems. They also use something called NASLINK, which is firmware that can adjust to mixed NAS workloads to make the most out of cash usage in real time. So you get consistent performance for file sharing, backups, and rate operations. So pick up some Tashiba N300 Pro drives for your NAS today using our link in the video description. The show is also brought to you by Motion Grey. Working eight hours a day at your desk, then spending several hours at another desk at home, while gaming can certainly make your lower back feel less than stellar. It's important to take breaks in between emails and ranked matches to stretch your legs in back,

and Motion Graze Ergo Pro 2 sit stand desk can help with that. You can work while standing for longer periods, plus the desk comes with a bunch of customization options like cable management or foot massagers. No matter what size desk you go with, Motion Graze Ergo 2 supports up to 176 pounds and comes in both light and dark color options. The desk is easy to clean, has smooth edges, and is built to handle most scuffs and scratches that a desk would face, not to mention it's powered by German Bosch Motors. You know, the Germans always make good stuff. When you order your desk, everything comes in a single box, so you don't have to worry about getting your legs on Friday and then the actual desk after the weekend. And everything you need to assemble, including the necessary tools, is packaged with the desk. So grab your motion gray

Ergo 2 Pro at our link in the video description. My first laptop was a Tishiba, and I actually really, really liked it. I got to get some new drives. I'm approaching. five years. No errors yet. Ooh. They're gonna be expensive. Yeah, I was gonna say. Oh, the show was brought you.

No, no. The show is brought you by the next topic. The color blue. The letter E. Lenovo is now shipping laptops with Chinese NAND and Apple has begun testing CXMT chips. It begins.

That's right. Notebook check says, in the midst of the Ram and Estesdy Crisis, a new player has appeared. this YMTC SSD shipping in the Thinkbook 14G9 in Europe but not North America is a 512 gig M.D2 2242 drive that has sequential reads up to 3950 megabytes a second and writes up to 2514. That's below average for an SSD in an office laptop these days and it apparently throttles under load but an everyday use is still more than fast enough. And then in related news, Apple is testing memory chips from CXMT for Apple devices. sold in China. The company is also lobbying Washington to allow broader use of CXMT chips despite

geopolitical sensitivities. Financial Times says CXMT is now the world's fourth largest DRAM maker in a key pillar of China's semiconductor ambitions, though analysts say its production is still too constrained to meaningfully ease the global memory crunch anytime soon. But those Apple dollars would probably help to turn that around. In other China news, Bight Dance and Alibaba have killed custom AI companions following new rules in China. This is the, China is putting into effect what they're calling interim measures for AI anthropomorphic interaction services on July 15th.

And basically this policy is designed to prohibit services that simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns, and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction. So customer service bots, knowledge Q&A's, workplace assistance, and education and research tools are excluded, provided that they avoid sustained emotional interaction. So NextWeb.com, the NextWeb.com says, companions out, workers in. So both ByteDance and Alibaba have just killed their products that were designed to provide companionship. it is very disappointing to me whenever I have to side with the Chinese government

and acknowledge that they're just doing a common sense thing that probably everyone should be doing I don't know, Blade Runner is pretty cool I saved the best topic for last NVDA is making new cards Yeah Nvidia is dropping a free limited edition

G-Forse trading card series one collection celebrating iconic GPUs, games, and RTS tech demos. You can get them through summer of RTS giveaways or at select gaming events while supplies laugh. Last. Nathan thought, possibly not appropriate or copyright safe, but it reminds me of a bit of Flanders

Bible trading cards from the Simpsons. Yeah. That's a deep cut. That's an old reference. I don't remember that. I actually used to watch a lot of sense. I don't remember that. I don't think we should watch it, though.

We're not going to. I'm going to. Jordan Block can't wait for NVIDIA's crossover with Magic the Gathering, and based on some of Magic's previous crossovers and NVIDIA partnership isn't even that far-fetched. Cool. Discussion question, do you have any rare

slash interesting tech merch that you're particularly fond of? Oh my God. Sorry. So good. So good. I like the 1000 series launch. They sent out those weird triangles. Oh yeah, I remember that. I actually thought that was really cool because it felt like a Nathan Drake. Artifact. Uncharted. You know.

Divinti code. And it's funny. I still have it in my little storage unit thing. And whenever I pull it out, I'm like, what is this? Because the box isn't really marked much. And I open it up. I'm like, oh, yeah. And there's just an unmarked letter. and then the triangle. I'm like, this is cool. When I die eventually and someone gets this,

they're going to be like, what? They used to do such cool stuff. Remember when they sent out those green crow bars? Yeah. Yeah. Actually kind of sick. Ammo case. We have a G-Force ammo box kicking around somewhere that the, I believe the, oh man,

the 590, I guess it was, the dual GPU one from that generation. It came in the animal. Yeah, I know at least one reviewer whose card arrived damaged because like it wasn't really quite big enough and like not packed that well but it was cool yep um so anyway people are just trying to buy everything i have now so one's trying to offer me money for the triangle go away that would be a very interesting auction around here like like the the lmg goes out of business auction just like all the weird artifacts like there's some stuff i'd be interested in for sure oh i assume you'd want this yeah yeah definitely that's for sure what i was talking about yeah

for sure. Reverse it? Reverse it real quick? Nice. Very good. My daughter was in the office earlier this week. And she came across this and was just very enamored by it. And she dragged it into the video that we were shooting together.

Great. It was a fun video, though. So I told her, yeah, I'll buy a new battery for your phone. But you have to put it in. And she came. she helped me do a battery swap. I need to do that soon. I was thinking recently,

I've heard about some of the leak rumors of the pixel 11, and it sounds really not cool. But I'm on a pixel 8, so it's starting to feel a little bit old. And I was thinking, honestly, the only thing that's really feeling

that old about it is the battery. So maybe I should just do a little swap and just not even upgrade. Because honestly, at this point, like, my phone is fine. Dude, her phone is 60 years old. Yeah. And I couldn't even,

like tell. She's on a note 10. I didn't even realize how old that phone was until I looked it up. And I was like, oh yeah, that battery is at the end. Yeah. Yeah. So my phone is three years oldish. It's right about that like the normal cadence I would expect to potentially replace a phone. A fresh battery and a graphene OS install and it'll feel like a brand new phone. Yeah. So like whatever. Just like it's a brand new after dark. Dan, do you want to hit us with some checkout messages? Oh yeah. You're just getting good at these transitions. I don't even have time anymore.

That button. That button. Okay, I did it. Now I have to read things. Good job, Dan. I've only done a couple of these. It'll be alone. Hey, Lacu Lines and Dunn.

One of my co-workers just got a shirt with the definition of ask hole on it. Very funny. Do you have any fun, any type of stories of ask holes in your lives? What's an ask? A person who asks for advice but refuses to follow it. A person who asks excessive or offensive questions or favors. And I actually don't feel like I run into this too often. Um, oh, I definitely do. Um, I, like some other people in the tech industry, um, I have a not super secret.

contact info. And I, you know, other than just, other than people just like soliciting crap, which I just ignore and filter forever, you know, I try to, if someone, you know, has a really good idea for a video, you'll occasionally see us acknowledge it, like in the video. I'll be like, yeah, so-and-so sent a thing.

To be clear, it's not the best way to get acknowledged, probably I am more likely to ignore you if you email me versus if you like you know at me on the forum or something like that but I do get some people who you know I will I'll send a like hey thanks for you know whatever you appreciate you like I we're not pen pals and I have limited time to reply to like work related emails and stuff so Some people just don't really seem to, like, get it that this is like a...

No, sorry, no... Like a one email. You can't stop me. I'll still email you every few years. Yeah. No key, that's fine. You like, actually, like, we pay you and stuff. Like, you kind of work here, sort of from around the globe.

It's complicated. Um, anyway, yeah. I mean, I've read into this. I, like, I, I, you know, you read it and I recognize it. I get it. At events. super calm. At events.

People will come and they'll ask you a question and you'll be like, oh yeah, I don't know. This motherboard seems pretty good. It has the features you want. And then they're like, oh, yeah, like what GPU should I plug into? I'm like, bro, I'd go watch a video. That's what I do for a living is I make content

so that you can go watch it and then you know the answer. So yeah, it's tough. It's tough. More? As for like asking advice only to ignore the guidance. I definitely, I'm not willing to, throw any real life people under the bus over this. But I think everyone has people in their life who mostly, when they ask for advice,

just want to make noise. Hot take? Yeah. I think everyone's done that. Everyone's done it. But some people do it a lot. That's fair. Everyone does something that's against the better judgment of them and everyone in their

life once in a while. Yeah. I bought a plane. I've broken him. I knew that was going to get him. An epic flying mount, says Amaria. We've broken him, ladies and gentlemen. Oh my God.

Dan, hit me. Sure. Question for Slick. Did you ever complete Star Wars Outlaws? I just did. No. No, I enjoyed it. No, I didn't.

Hello, Mr. I might go back to it at some point. I don't even remember why I stopped. It might have been Linux challenge. In general, I'm not finding Ubisoft games to be very friendly with Linux. Yeah. Hello, Mr. Tip of Technology. In a previous show, you said you wouldn't let your kids be esport pros.

Just want to hear your reasoning. Okay, yeah, I can explain that pretty easily, actually. it's for the same reason that I won't let my kids play the lottery because while the reward at the end of the rainbow is theoretically totally worth the time investment the very very select few who make it to that point are very few and very select And literally everyone else who invested all of that time and all that singular focus and energy into that one thing will not go pro and will ultimately have to be a well-rounded person who knows other things about other things and can do other stuff.

So it's not so much that I would have objected to them achieving the pinnacle of success in gaming. it's that we weren't going to do all the stuff that was going to give them that shot. We're not going to spend that much time in front of a screen, period. I just don't think it's part of, to be clear, they are allowed to play video games, and they get screen time pretty much every day. They trade it for doing other enriching things. It doesn't even feel like a particularly low amount of screen time. There's just, like you said, they've got to do stuff to...

My son's really good at Rocket League. And pretty darn good at Minecraft. He's had enough time to, like, get good enough at video games that, because video games are a huge social thing. I don't want them to be... Yeah, you don't want to just, like, suck. Yeah, you don't want them to not be able to, like, hang out and play some ultimate chicken horse. Yes, exactly. Yeah, like, that's not actually good either.

Yeah. So, so for me, it was... It is a current cultural thing. It was just part of... It was part of the whole strategy of wanting to raise balanced human beings. And for the same reason, while I... support, like sports, for instance, I've made it very clear from day zero

that, like, you're not going to be a professional athlete. Not because it's impossible, but because the odds are so slim that I might as well be saying, you will not win the lottery. What if? Yes.

And I feel like I know we're going to go with this, but I'm just going to throw the what if anyways. Yeah. What if, you know, little man is really, really, really, really, really, really good it a certain thing. Yeah. He goes to provincials for it.

And he's the MVP on the winning team of provincials. The chances at that point are genuinely quite high. What do you do? So at that point, what we do is we basically lay down some ground rules because he's old enough by then that it's time to start making his own choices. Because that's like that's the Eastport. Oh, right. That's the third pillar of why no e-sports because your career is over.

when you're like 26. And you might be able to be a successful streamer, but a lot of e-sports pros do not successfully transition there. So that was the last part of that one. Sports has a little bit of a higher ceiling. I mean, Yukovic is still playing at an elite level in tennis. He's almost 40.

I think honestly sports is way more potentially stable of a path than e-sports is. Like traditional sports. I don't even think that's a crazy take. I don't think so either. So, okay. So by that point, he's old enough that he's starting to have some of his own agency, right? Up until that point, we've been pretty supportive. So him in particular, he's, for one athletic pursuit or another, been training as often as three to four times a week for his entire childhood, pretty much, going back like six, seven, eight years now.

So we're supportive of be good at sports, because that's another thing that's really important socially. it is hard to meet people as adults but if you are good at a sport it actually becomes way easier it's amazing how many doors get open for you like when I was getting into badminton it was so hard to socially network with people in that community

all of a sudden now that I'm pretty good people like want to meet you and it's like oh that just I was never good at sports so that was not a that was not a window that I had ever looked through but it's totally a thing. And so...

A lot of it's honestly, once you get to a certain age, people are trying to do the activity. And holding your hand is not really doing the activity. Yeah, that's something you do for your girlfriend or your boyfriend. Almost doesn't even matter what the activity is. Sports is a good example here. It could be a lot of different things. And video games too.

Yep. Where it's like, man, like, okay, if you want to play with us, sure, sounds good, but you should probably go like kind of figure it out on your own and then come join us once you know what you're doing. Yep. The one, if I see two people on a court or like two people playing a video game who have like a vastly different level of skill, my assume is they're related or they're banging. Yep. Like there's there's already a different or they want to. Related. Yeah. Yeah. They want to be either. That's the saddest of the three. Yeah. Uh, they, uh, they, uh, they, uh, you have some, like,

highly invested, very long-term reason why you might want to, whatever. Maybe this is a friend that you've played a lot of other games with, and they just haven't played this one. And you're pretty sure they'll pick it up pretty quick. So you just need to kind of get them there or whatever. Like, that's fine. So yeah, would we support pursuing a professional athlete path? I think what it would look like is helping them make their own decision and helping them come to a conclusion that you need to set some guardrails here and you need to have an escape hatch. I think because it probably won't work out.

But if you could win some scholarships, by all means, win the scholarships, we will give you the resources to hone this skill, but you're still going to school. I think there's also a tremendous amount of skills that you learn from both, but more traditional sports, in my opinion, but from both, that do transfer out of it.

it. And traditional sports, there's plenty of athletes that have become pro and gotten proper good degrees and done lots of things outside of that because you need rest time and stuff much more than you need it in the e-sports world. Oh, this is so true too. So like in that rest time, in that downtime, you could be doing other stuff. You could be studying. You could be doing whatever else. You can't be in the gym all day. Yeah, you need to rest. And like you might be young and not feel like that's as true, but it's going to become more true. And it is pretty true for you as well. So like there is more inherent built-in downtime with traditional sports.

And I think sports teaches us a lot about how to deal with people. Social situations. Yeah. It's very easy to cycle people out in the video game world. It's a lot harder to do that when you're on a team and those aren't even your decisions anyways. So yeah. Bottom line is, you know. Look at Shaq.

He transitioned from sports to everything. Yeah. That's pretty good. Want to buy a printer? All right, go ahead. Hit me down. Sure thing. Hey, Wanda DLL.

Luke, loving Bud and Pound with Sammy. Do you all have any preliminary ideas for future videos? What's coming next? It was awesome to meet you all in Taiwan minus Dan. I'm glad you're happy I wasn't there. I don't think that's what he meant. I don't know, sort of. We've done some ideation.

But it's not like it's, as I've talked about it on the show before, It's a, it's a creative brain stretching exercise. It's not a job. So like, it'll happen when it happens. We were planning a shoot for like maybe late next month. If you go paintballing, I'm in. Oh, interesting. That's a fun idea.

I don't know if that's a video, but whatever. There would have to be some like weird challenge involved or something, but I'm sure we could figure something out. I'm down for weird challenges. Challenge. Sprang my ankle even worse Playing paintball with Luke again What about both ankles? Sammy has two different ideas right now

But I don't know how he'd feel with me Spoiling them so I'm gonna Oh yeah, no, no, keep them to yourself Hold them for now But they're pretty creative. Sammy's a very creative guy He is that This for me has been a really good experience

Because of that largely Like I've technically made a ton of content But it's either been Wancho or tech stuff with a tiny amount of channel super fun thrown in. But the channel super fun, I was very much just participator. Yeah. And they were all like pretty similarly flavored,

if that makes sense. So this is Sammy going crazy and doing Sammy things. He does do that. Me trying to hold on largely, which is fun. And I think good for my brain because it gets me out of just the doing kind of the same thing all the time, which is good,

especially I find when you get older that can become a, a much more of a default state. And it's one of the reasons why it feels like time goes so fast is because there's not a lot of deviation to your day. You just kind of do the same thing. You're working on the same problems. You start finding routine because that's what's efficient and you hang out with the same people.

You talk about the same things, et cetera. So, yeah, getting out there and doing something different has been really fun. I'm excited to keep doing more of it. And I'm happy you enjoyed it. But it's not, the schedule is always going to be completely random. because it's just going to be like whatever we can swing. We are going to try to figure out more like one-day shoot things. That would be a way to make it not so onerous.

Yeah. So the plan moving forward is the two plans that he has are both one-day shoots. So we can just do it on like a, you know, a Saturday or whatever. So we'll see how it goes. All right. Well, I volunteer's tribute if you guys ever need a third buddy. Yeah, sweet. I'll mention that.

Not always around, but, and there's no pressure. Yeah, I don't know. I want to insert myself. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure we'll do something at some point that makes sense to have a bigger group of people. Okay. Yeah. Linus.

Dan. Where have you gone skiing? What was your favorite? I love skiing. My favorite was Lake Tahoe. Love the undies. I, too, picked skiing back up after 25 years. Oh, nice.

How do you ski on a lake, is my one question. Uh, I think it's a mountain near the lake, Dan, but yes. Well, you didn't say that. You should have been more specific. Water skiing? Oh. That's pretty good.

That's good. Now I look like an idiot. More than normal. Well, it's not so much that you look like an idiot. It's more sound like an idiot. Sound like an idiot. Well, why not both? Uh, ah, ah, ah, bah.

Uh, uh, blah. Uh, uh, uh, that's just, um, I would have laughed so hard. If you put the card up of us, just put your head in Linus's little thing. It's too hard. I've actually not been skiing that many places. I've been up to Hemlock, which I think is called something else out in like Agassi Mission Area. I don't know what they're called now.

I've been to On Grouse and Seymour locally. I've skied Whistler here a lot when I was younger, but I wouldn't bother going up there now. It's just... Super overcrowded and super expensive. Yeah. Like it just manages to be the worst of both worlds. Like if it was crazy expensive, it was like, you know, I don't even, I don't even, I don't even know. But if it was like, it was like more, but I just like skied right onto the lift at the bottom. And there's fresh powder everywhere.

Then I might, yeah, then I might even consider that. As like a special treat. But as it is now, it's like, well, it's the worst of both worlds. Or if it was cheap, then fine, I'll stand in line. But right now it's expensive. and I stand in line. What are we even doing here? I had a pretty good routine of going to Seymour for a while, but Seymour like, I'm worried about them.

They're pretty low. They barely got any snow last year. Like I'm actually worried about their ability to keep going. We went to Big White this year for a family blog. So, yeah, you'll see how much I enjoyed Big White. It's freaking awesome. I was going to say I'm pretty sure they're holding on pretty okay in regards to snow and stuff. So it was funny. The locals there were completely. a ton about the snow. I'm like, y'all got snow. You all need to shut up. This seems great to me. That's a luxury right now. Yeah. Yeah, we've had some real warm winters. I was talking my brother about this. I remember

growing up pulling icicles off the house that were like huge. Like, man, what's the last time I saw an icicle hanging off of anything? I feel like it's been a very long time. We had a few years there where we'd get at least like a couple weeks of some pretty solid snow. But it's, it's been a while, I think. It's been a while. Hey, Linus and Luke. Love the merch. All right, blocked.

What's both of your favorite merch in your wardrobe? I actually really like this shirt. Oh, the Siberia. Yeah. It's sold really well. I really like the shirt. I have always really liked shirts where the branding isn't like super obvious. and where it's small logo front, big logo back.

I will say, however, you were right, the green Siberia shirt where it's big logo front. I do actually like it, but I think it's because it's not a logo. It's more like one of those. Oh, like graffiti. Kind of like artsy and just kind of neat. I will always kind of fall back to these small logo front,

big logo back. But I like Siberia. It's pretty cool. It's hard for me to pick a favorite child. The new socks are a candidate. it. I'm really excited about them. If I had to pick something, I think the framework embroidered all over embroidered hoodie. It's so cool.

My favorite all time is the 3D down jacket. We have a kind of successor. It's not using the same 3D down, but it's a very similar style. It has a bit more reflective. The hood has been fine-tuned. I tried it on earlier this week and we're going ahead to mass production. part was not the 3D down. Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's a worthy successor. I think you'll really like it. My favorite part about that jacket was that it actually looked really like clean

and sharp. I could wear that with nice clothes and it would fit it. And it's a jacket. Like it was, it was, it was nice. I actually got a lot of comments on it. Because I usually wear this and a variation of color of the same pair of shorts. Nice. Almost all of the time. So the fact that I wore something that was kind of nice, people were like, oh, which is not a good sign. And I'm going to be, yeah, yeah. I need to cycle the shorts out. This is something I've accepted. It's good for me now because there's the, we have nice pants.

The, um, the tech pants. I do kind of wish there was a, couple more colors. How are the tech pants selling? I haven't asked about that. Actually, we're starting to get the hang of bottoms. Nice, the tall, well, maybe not nice for other people, but some of the tall tech pants are sold out, which is maybe a good sign for them becoming a thing again. Yeah. Yeah, I really, the tech pants are actually very nice. Hit us, Dan.

LDL, with the release of the price of the steam machine. Are we optimistic for the price of the frame? Will Luke still buy it? I mean, I think Valve will still... The frame kind of feels like a different category of thing. Yeah, I think they're still going to pull it off. I think they're still going to manage to be pretty close to index pricing because they weren't even trying to be cheap on that one.

Nope. And I don't know if Luke's going to buy it. I mean, he bought a big screen beyond two, and then still, to my knowledge, hasn't used it. Yeah, when are you going to try it? I need to know. Have you even tried it? No. Something that might benefit the frame, though, is that I don't, at this point, I don't think I get aesthetic choices when it comes to the, the condo.

Right. Yeah, that's, that's all Emma's domain, I guess. So the frame might actually be able to be used more easily. Ah. I mean, I think I've told you that I've barely touched. There won't be to drill big boxes in the wall. I've barely touched my VR setup. Ever since I put that passive case, you know the one I'm talking about the Callios collab with Streetcom, right? Oh, God, it's such a cool case. Yeah, so ever since I put that there,

because of the way the I.O. works on it, it, like, doesn't really work very well with the little I.O. boxes on the index and the big screen beyond. So it's been, like, kind of janky and weird for, like, quite a while. And what I really want to do is I want to get that case up off the floor, so it's, like, more showcasey, get the panels on it properly, like cable managed it all nicely. But I just kind of, as soon as I found out about the steam frame,

I went, well, I'm not even going to bother, because then everything's going to be wireless and I'm just kind of sitting here tapety, tapety, tapy, tapy, tapy, tapy, tapy, patiently waiting okay, steam frame. Because even if the displays are not as good as the big screen beyond, I, I... Man, the wireless streaming, dude, I tried it.

I was there. I was there when they revealed the wireless stream. It's so good. I keep forgetting that it has wireless streaming. Wireless streaming. Don't tell me that. I also, like, I had my bench where the computers are. Yeah.

And that was very... space restrictive. So this last weekend, we moved the bench out to a different room where it's kind of like out of the way, which is good. And, you know, now people won't stub their toes on my weights and stuff. So it probably makes more sense to be over there. Yeah. So maybe that'll clear up some room and maybe I can do that now.

But we'll see. Last one I've got here is for Luke. Question for Luke. Can you shout out any tools the devs have built to Up Arrow, their qual, that would be useful outside of LTT? I've been working on a CLI tool for managing the tasks I'm assigned in our project management system. Any quality of life improvements? That would be useful outside of LTT. I mean, we've contributed to open source projects, but outside of that, like the stuff we build internally is,

not external. LTT Labs has some of their stuff open sourced. You can check out, I think it's literally LTT Labs OSS on GitHub. But I don't know, we've built some internal tools. I can't think of much that would be particularly helpful outside of LTT. The main one that I know of is called Yelling Bird. And it was made by Mr. Peter. and it's just a Slackbot

which shows the progress of videos as they transcode on floatplane and well and the total flip plane infrastructure because it includes

sauce plus and that's been pretty nice actually especially because you can do like actions from it and stuff and you there's there's buttons there to open like the ACP or the admin UI so you can see what's going on

and it has a little progress indicator as it goes and it tells you the unique idea of the video and blah blah blah blah so like that's that's really useful but in terms of like cicd stuff that we built i don't know i can't really think of anything the team will probably shoot me now but yeah holy crap i just got invited on a podcast with uh victor axelson who oh you know who that is because of you oh i see okay cool you've mentioned him a few times i'm excited yeah i bet that's cool that's fun yeah i met him once already and it was horrible. I know.

Not because of him. I know. Because of me. There's video of this, isn't there? Unfortunately, yes. Well, here, now's your time to make it up. Yeah. Hopefully it'll be less awkward.

I mean, it couldn't be more awkward. You should bring up the story on the show. Sure, fine. Oh, I definitely will. Because I'm going to have to explain myself. You'll be fine. This is probably good because now you won't. be stuck with like the one time you met Victor Axelson. Yeah, yeah. Now you'll have some

redemption. The redeeming time I met Victor Axlinson. Yeah. People are asking who he is. He's Olympic gold men singles badminton player. Um, was world number one for like a long time. Um, absolute Chad. He runs a YouTube channel. Super cool. He actually just recently retired from the tour, but he's still doing content apparently. And, uh, he's going on a podcast. So, Do you know when? Nope, I just got a, I just got a ping from the, uh, the guys who run our badminton club. Apparently the outreach came through them. Okay.

So maybe you let when people know when you know. Yeah, no, I'm, yeah, I'm stoked. It'll be awesome. Sweet. Yeah, that business is, um, going interesting for Smash Champs. It's, um, I heard that call last week. I don't know, I doubt you want to talk about that, but. which one interesting the training thing oh oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so we're interesting

we're going to be running our own training programs rather than partnering with someone else going forward that's i think going to start in september so we're hiring a head coach right now and um it's one of those things where like if it was my full-time job there's like so much stuff that i'd want to do um but also i think accelerating it to that degree would not be cost effective So taking this slow and steady approach makes a ton of sense and the guys who are running it are just like they're so dialed.

Like they're so, they're just like badminton people like neither of them had a career whatsoever in like badminton. But they just are like super super super super passionate and then just really smart people. And so we kind of figured, well, you know, whatever. You figure a lot of things out with that combination.

Smart people who are passionate will figure it out. And so they did that lead up. to like opening was like hell. I'm sure I'm putting words in their mouth, but I'm sure both of them almost quit multiple times. Because a startup is hard. Starting something up from nothing is hard.

If you've never done it before and you criticize someone else who started something, you need to go do it first, then you're allowed to throw stones because it's hard. Nobody, like something as simple. It's like picking which payment terminal. Like it's not simple. Nothing is simple.

You have to figure out everything. And so yeah, but once we got to grand opening, things got better. And they're figuring out a lot, but, you know, we realized something. We had our grand opening tournament about a year ago, and we gave away, like, a lot of, like, memberships. And what we noticed is, like, membership sign up stalled around the, like, one-year anniversary. We went, oh, people are probably waiting for us to, like, give away more memberships during our anniversary tournament.

Like, like, there's just so many little mistakes you're going to make. Like, maybe we went too aggressive on that. I don't forget where I was going with this, but it's, it's been interesting, not really running because I'm more just like the, I'm almost more of like a sponsor of the business or like an investor in the business in a sense, not that I ever expect like a big return from it or anything, because I'm not running it day to day, but it's been very interesting running a completely different business. I think it's an investor relationship because you give input and stuff.

Oh yeah, yeah, but I don't run it. Yeah, totally. Yeah. it's like if you think about how framework originally expected your relationship to work oh that is it more similar to that uh no uh they originally want input and stuff framework i don't even remember i thought they wanted to have like calls with you and stuff and you're just like whatever good luck uh that might have been that might have been hashtag okay maybe i don't and i talk i talk to them occasionally i talked to them occasionally but that's

Honestly, though, that's mostly just because John's super chill. And, like, I like John. Yeah, sure. But that's, it's funny, because that's so much of, like, how business works. And I never really, like, wanted it to be like that. Like, if I could, if I could will business to not work like that, if everything was just on merit, if I could will that into existence, I would. But it's just not how it works. Yeah.

Some of it makes sense to me. You got to be not horrible to work with. Oh. I remember what I was trying to say about smash champs. Right. So one of the things that we're looking at is a way to increase value for our premium members who are the ones that really help us fund the club. Although, you know, everyone who comes in play is obviously like is appreciated to help, you know, build momentum and build a community there.

But the premium members, the ones who are signing up for the long haul and who are in there, you know, two, three, four, five times a week and are like the seed crystal. around which something can grow because nobody signs up for a sports session that has zero people. You know what I mean? Like that, like your core, right?

So we're trying to find ways to create more value and things like bringing in, you know, former pros or like prominent badminton YouTubers to do like clinics and stuff. There's actually a channel. That's pretty safe.

Badminton family. Yeah, these guys. These guys are doing a clinic this summer. Like at Smash? Yeah. So he came out for like a scouting mission. He was looking for a facility in the lower mainland to do like an in-person camp. They apparently do these in Denmark and you basically go for like, I think it's a week.

And it's for professional amateurs. He does these in Denmark and he just happened to be looking for a badminton facility in the lower mainland. They wanted to do one in Western North America. and so he came to find the right location. Okay. And so they do them in Denmark and it's like, it sounds like the kind of thing I'd love to do. They market them to professional amateurs

and you basically go for an entire week and you do nothing. But eat, breathe and sleep badminton for a week. And just like you do training and coaching, you go to the gym, you get a bunch of like one-on-one time with the coach, you hang, you network with people, you meet people. It sounds really cool.

So they're going to do one at our club. sure are. Yeah, there it is. Family Camp, BC, Canada, 2026. I don't know if they actually have any spots open, but if they do, then now would be a great time to pay and secure spots. So we worked out a deal with them where we gave them a really good deal on the court time. So they're still making profit, even though they got to come all the way out here in order to host it. And then they have one in Indonesia as well in October, which is super cool. What a neat what a neat thing to do to kind of really engage in person

with your community and honestly I think it's a pretty good value for what it is. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, these types of four day program. And he's like a crazy good player.

I played with him just like he was just going easy on me, just goofing around. But just the shot quality and movement and everything's cool makes me feel bad but in a motivating way

you know what I mean yeah yeah well that's all I got yeah what do you want crystal it's $800 just for a week like what do you think professional training costs like oh man

money's got a money depending on the class size for that many days of training it's not super outlandish to me for this type of thing I don't think so either Is that it for today? Yeah.

Wow. We got a special guest for the outro. We have a special guest for the outro. Sad Michael Reeves. All right, we'll see you guys again next week. Same bad time. Same bad channel. Bye.

On July 16th, the Hawk lands on Netflix. From the mind of Will Ferrell. Oh, Mama, I'm back. Comes a new original series. Get ready. Get ready. That's it. Did I stutter?

When an iconic pro golfer. Lonnie? Honny! Hocked! Dad, I'm a big shot golfer. No one. Dad, I'm the Hawk now. Will stand in his way.

That's how it's done. The Hawk, only on Netflix, July 16th.